New to Office 365 & Contract IT work

[GLaDOS]

Hello all,

I've been asked to provide contracted IT work to a friend of a friend. A lot of their questions are pretty basic stuff, but some of them involve Office 365 and Microsoft Exchange, which I haven't had much exposure to; to date, most of my IT experience comes from providing help to family and friends on their home computers, but I have been taking classes to expand my knowledge base and learn more about enterprise-level IT.

They are starting a new, small business using Office 365 E3. One of the requests they made for me was to put together a list of training videos for Windows 8 and Office 365. I've found a few good YouTube channels and I was also going to show them Lynda.com but I wanted to see if anyone had any videos they would recommend.

Another issue they wanted me to look into was importing contacts from an Excel file into Microsoft Exchange. I'm just starting my research on this, but if anyone has done this in the past, I'd love to get your confirmation that this works.

Finally, I am new to the world of contract IT work. As I mentioned before, most of the help I provide is to family and friends for their home computers and I never charge for any of that. This is the first time I would need to provide some type of hourly rate for my work and, to be honest, I'm not sure what a fair rate would be. I want to give them an honest rate, but I just don't know what that would be, so if anyone has done this type of work in the past, I would really appreciate your recommendations.

Thanks so much for answering any of the above questions. I really appreciate your time!

 

[Lexluethar]

Windows 8 Jump start: Windows 8 Jump Start - Free, Online Technical Training | TechNet

Office 365 jump start: Administering Office 365 Jump Start (01): Office 365 Overview | TechNet Video

Google Jump Start - they are MS certified / sanctioned training videos on MS products.

You can import contacts into Outlook through the file menu. You will have to make the file a .csv first. As for exchange, i can look this week at work but usually you import on the client side, not exchange.

An honest rate is based off how valuable your time is and experience. This is dependent on you. Generally speaking if you look on average IT shops charge between $60 to $150 an hour. Again depends on your expertise. I just got a quote from a vendor that is charging around $300 an hour for very specific enterprise server work (not out of the ordinary). Not trying to sound harsh, but it doesn't sound like you have much experience, so unless your time is extremely valuable and you don't want the business you probably shouldn't charge any more than $40 or so an hour.

It also depends on the work, if it's something like replacing a hard drive, or installing windows my rate is generally cheaper because that is easy to do, doesn't require much effort and if you charge too much it's a task that can be easily done by any other company out there or someones cousin in high school. Now when you get into stuff like implementing Active Directory, GPO, IPsec, DNS, Exchange - those types of enterprise stuff that is a different story and i would charge well over $100 for that.

 

[carnageX]

I just got a quote from a vendor that is charging around $300 an hour for very specific enterprise server work (not out of the ordinary).

We've had to call in a Zebra label printer tech before at where I work, and they charge $900 / hr because it's a very specific label printer. Glad he was only here for about 2 hours .

 

[Lexluethar]

Exactly, depends on the work man. Supply and demand, macro economics at it's finest. If you can't find anyone else to do the work i can charge you way more for that work

 

[carnageX]

Exactly, depends on the work man. Supply and demand, macro economics at it's finest. If you can't find anyone else to do the work i can charge you way more for that work

Lol yup, exactly.

It's funny because I work on those label printers a lot here, so I'm sure I could get a job doing something like that if I wanted to / got proper training lol. Thing is... I hate working on those things lol.

 

[GLaDOS]

Windows 8 Jump start: Windows 8 Jump Start - Free, Online Technical Training | TechNet

Office 365 jump start: Administering Office 365 Jump Start (01): Office 365 Overview | TechNet Video

Google Jump Start - they are MS certified / sanctioned training videos on MS products.

You can import contacts into Outlook through the file menu. You will have to make the file a .csv first. As for exchange, i can look this week at work but usually you import on the client side, not exchange.

An honest rate is based off how valuable your time is and experience. This is dependent on you. Generally speaking if you look on average IT shops charge between $60 to $150 an hour. Again depends on your expertise. I just got a quote from a vendor that is charging around $300 an hour for very specific enterprise server work (not out of the ordinary). Not trying to sound harsh, but it doesn't sound like you have much experience, so unless your time is extremely valuable and you don't want the business you probably shouldn't charge any more than $40 or so an hour.

It also depends on the work, if it's something like replacing a hard drive, or installing windows my rate is generally cheaper because that is easy to do, doesn't require much effort and if you charge too much it's a task that can be easily done by any other company out there or someones cousin in high school. Now when you get into stuff like implementing Active Directory, GPO, IPsec, DNS, Exchange - those types of enterprise stuff that is a different story and i would charge well over $100 for that.

Thanks for the links to the videos and the information. These videos definitely look helpful for the office admin who would be doing some of the IT administration work. I was also looking for something to train their employees on how to use Windows 8 and Office 365. Maybe something like: https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLzj7TwUeMQ3hgykd_WRVa1xiKJs9E24VU

I figured a .csv file would be necessary. They reason I wanted to put it on Exchange was so that the same list (~1500 contacts) was globally available to all users; also, when a contact updates the office admin. can make the change once and all the users would have it. I was trying to avoid a scenario where each employee had their own individual contact list - which, if I understand you correctly, would be the case if I imported on the client side?

No worries, that is not harsh at all - I completely agree with you. I don't have a huge IT skill set yet (but I'm building it up everyday!) so your recommendations are totally on par with what I had in mind. I just wanted to make sure I wasn't way off base.

 

[Lexluethar]

Good stuff. As for the contacts available for everyone in IT - that would be setup in exchange as a GAL (global address list). It comprises of an exchange record (and subsequent AD) for each contact that you would like to show. Then you publish that record in exchange and into AD. Once there a domain user could search for the contact in their own GAL - or other means if they have access to mmc.

There may be other ways of publishing items to the GAL that i'm just not aware of - i work in an enterprise environment so everything has an account and starts within ad and is further configured in exchange to publish to the GAL.

Keep on truckin man, drive is the number one character trait to have in this industry.

 

[GLaDOS]

Good stuff. As for the contacts available for everyone in IT - that would be setup in exchange as a GAL (global address list). It comprises of an exchange record (and subsequent AD) for each contact that you would like to show. Then you publish that record in exchange and into AD. Once there a domain user could search for the contact in their own GAL - or other means if they have access to mmc.

There may be other ways of publishing items to the GAL that i'm just not aware of - i work in an enterprise environment so everything has an account and starts within ad and is further configured in exchange to publish to the GAL.

Keep on truckin man, drive is the number one character trait to have in this industry.

Ok, cool. I'll take a look at the GAL and let you know if I run into any issues.

Something I noticed with Office 365 - all of the programs this company is using are web apps that seem to also be available when the computer is offline. Has Microsoft gotten away from the actual more-robust programs like Outlook 2010? Or are those still available somewhere?

Thanks for the encouragement! It is much appreciated!