Category Archives: Cloud Services
Microsoft Virtual Academy – Improve your IT skill set and advance your career
Fantastic, free, easy to access training portal from Microsoft. Learn at your own pace, focusing on Microsoft technologies, gain points and get recognition.
The Microsoft Virtual Academy offers no-cost, easy-access training for IT professionals who want to get ahead in cloud computing. MVA guides you through the latest cloud computing technologies and tools. By selecting the courses that match your needs, you can get up to speed quickly without wasting time on areas you are not interested in.
If you are competitive take assessments and gain points enabling you for future offers and benefits, you can even opt compare your results with others in league tables. Register now for free
Lync Online in Office 365 Overview Video
Microsoft Lync Online helps you find and quickly connect with the right person through instant messaging (IM), Lync video calls, or online meetings from within the Office applications you already use every day.
Office 365 public beta has arrived
Well Office 365 is still on track to launch worldwide later this year (fingers crossed, this summer).
Today, you can secure a spot in the Office 365 public beta and learn more about the service by clicking here. Following the Microsoft product team via http://twitter.com/#!/office365), Facebook (Office 365), and the Office 365 community blog available here is certainly worthwhile so you get the latest information as we near service RTM.
Office 365 Beta delivers provisioning Exchange personal archive in the cloud
I must confess this latest feature has me very excited. When Exchange 2010 personal archives was first made public I couldn’t wait recommending this for clients so imagine my dismay when it didn’t deliver admin options for archive placement until SP1. Now Office 365 Beta is enhancing the functionality of Exchange 2010 personal archives even further by providing a cloud service for anyone using an On-Premise Exchange environment. A more detailed posting on how this is possible can be found on the Exchange product team blog available here.
As a recap in Exchange 2010, Microsoft introduced for the very first time Personal Archives, an email archiving feature intended to allow you to reduce or eliminate PST files by provisioning archive mailboxes for your users. A more detailed description and more details regarding this functionality can be found at Understanding Personal Archives in Exchange 2010 documentation.
Unfortunately in Exchange 2010 RTM, you can only provision a user’s archive mailbox on the same mailbox database (MDB) as the user’s primary mailbox. The full benefits of Personal Archives was delivered with Exchange 2010 SP1, where you can also create the archive mailbox on a different MDB located on the same Mailbox server as the user’s primary mailbox, or on another Mailbox server!!!!
With Office 365 beta, a cloud target location is now made available for the Personal Archive while still maintaining the primary mailbox on your on-premises Mailbox servers running Exchange 2010 SP1. Even better news is you can seamlessly access the primary on-premises mailbox and archive in the cloud using Outlook 2010, Outlook 2007 and Outlook Web App (OWA).
Congratulations to the Microsoft product teams as this really provides Exchange admins greater flexibility.
Office 365 Service Description and Pricing
Well there still is a place for BPOS at the moment but now the market is hearing messages about Office 365. The improvements being made certainly make it a stronger proposition and closer in functionality with traditional on-premise solutions.
A couple of useful resources is available from Microsoft at the moment and worthy of a read.
Firstly the Microsoft Office 365 Fact Sheet has details on what is included in each version and pricing. Download it here.
Secondly the Office 365 Beta Service Descriptions provide details on SharePoint Online, Exchange Online, Lync Online, Office Web Apps and Office Pro Plus Beta services. Get the documents here.
Exchange Online—Evaluating Software-plus-Services
The Infrastructure Planning and Design team has introduced a new type of IPD guide written to help you make the best decisions for your organisation from both a business and a technology point of view. The first scenario guide, Exchange Online—Evaluating Software-plus-Services guide, provides a clear comparison of e-mail technologies across on-premises, standard hosting, and dedicated hosting scenarios. Use the guide as a framework for evaluating the technical feasibility of Microsoft Exchange Online. An overall scoring assessment is provided for each option, identifying key mail services and requirements for your organisation. Understand the impact of adopting software-plus-services, weigh the importance of each topic to your organisation, and learn which offering will serve you best.
Get the guide here.
Microsoft career conference
If only events like this was around when I entered the IT industry. Very interesting post on the Microsoft learning blog.
Are you struggling to identify the best solutions for the email environment you manage? You will of course have heard that companies such as Microsoft and others are now offering cloud-based email solution; but you may be unsure how to choose, whether or not the solutions are secure, how government regulations come into play and whether or not moving to a cloud-based solution is cost effective for your company. In this session ‘Opportunity Knocks - To Cloud or Not to Cloud’, David Elfassy will look at the competitive cloud-based email solutions, as well as hosted email solutions, and discuss the positives and negatives of each offering. David will also compare Cloud-based vs On-Premise (servers hosted in the company) and what these options can mean for you and your career.
Join Microsoft on November 18th at the Microsoft Certified Career Conference, join in the conversation on our fan site today.
Microsoft Dynamics CRM Online pricing details provisionally announced
Pricing details for Microsoft Dynamics CRM online was recently announced in London during a keynote address from Kirill Tatarinov, corporate vice president, Microsoft Business Solutions.
Tatarinov today announced a new global launch promotion for Microsoft Dynamics CRM Online at a price of $34 (€31) per user, per month for the first 12 months of service; this pricing will be available to new customers from launch until June 30, 2011. This promotion complements a partner incentive that was announced in July 2010, where partners can receive 40 percent margin on the value of new subscriptions for Microsoft Dynamics CRM Online during the same time period. Formal launch events for Microsoft Dynamics CRM 2011 and the upcoming global release of Microsoft Dynamics CRM Online will begin in January 2011.
Find out more here.
Is Live Meeting the Best Value in BPOS?
Do you agree with Brett?
In this 8 minute wecbast, Brett Hill demonstrates how you can easily setup a Live Meeting without leaving Outlook. The demo also include some of the capabilities of Live Meeting including desktop sharing, presenting PowerPoint decks, annotations during a meeting and discusses some of the ways you can use Live Meeting in your business.
