Hey for some reason I was asked to be one of the hosts at a couple of online chats coming up. These are open to the public so if you have questions about Microsoft's cloud stratgey, BPOS, or just want to hang out, come on down. Thanks, Brett TechTarget: http://itknowledgeexchange.techtarget...

I love tools. Particulalry this kind of tool that can help you when you need it. Direct from our upper echelon support and migration teams comes the MOSDAL (Microsoft Online Services Diagnostics and Logging) Support Toolkit. Not only does it come with the bits, you there's a detailed training help...

Hi, Santa came to town for BPOS during the holidaze and I wanted to update you on a couple of times. New Quickstartonlineservices.com Portal launched! My teammate Damon Sununtnasuk worked tirelessly to get the redesigned portal launched over the holidaze. The portal is a one-stop shop for BPOS...

Hi, Some new training classes have been posted to the partner learning center for Microsoft Partners that are marketing BPOS. (In other words, if you are not a Microsoft Partner, the content is not accessible). We will be posting some more technical training in January including a deeper dive on...

Announcing availability of the Business Productivity Online Suite Administration and Deployment on the Partner Learning Center https://training.partner.microsoft.com/learning/app/management/LMS_ActDetails.aspx?UserMode=0&ActivityId=569185 This one day instructor-led course provides students...

Announcing availability of the Business Productivity Online Suite Migration and Onboarding Deep Dive class on the Partner Learning Center https://training.partner.microsoft.com/learning/app/management/LMS_ActDetails.aspx?UserMode=0&ActivityId=568520 This two-day instructor-led course provides...

The Mac Sign-In application has been released and is now available for download from the Microsoft Download Center . The Sign-In Application provides a convenient way for users with computers using the Apple Macintosh operating system to access their e-mail and data on the Microsoft Online Services...

On Sunday morning (11/08), we published 15 additional sites – serving 14 more countries, in 9 more languages. This brings our total to 40 localized sites (including our first RTL language: Hebrew ). In additional to publishing new sites, we also enabled “Buy” functionality on the existing sites for India...

Upgrades and Enhancements The following features and capabilities are included in the October Service Update: Bulk Activation of Users PowerShell commandlets will be added to streamline the activation process, enabling administrators to easily automate the activation of a set of users. Most commonly...

One of the most interesting aspects of working with services as opposed to a bits on disk product group, is that we update capabilities all the time. That's really different than releasing service packs for features updates. One of the updates we released was adding Outlook 2003 as a client for Exchnage...

Internally, the Technical Product Management team had a Wiki they were using to keep track of all kind of issues. FAQs that were being asked all the time about things like public folders, mail enabled lists, how to work with proxy servers, when is feature "X" coming , blah blah blah. The cool thing...

The June update for services has been finished! This means that you can now use Outlook 2003 with BPOS. There are a couple of considerations relating the oflline address book and free/busy . See the BPOS team blog for details. Also, attachment size has been bumped to 30MB. Sweet! Brett

The Microsoft Online Services Monthly Service Update for June 2009 is currently in deployment and will be available to all customers by June 30. No scheduled downtime is planned for this release deployment. The release delivers two important capabilities: · Exchange Online attachments are...

“In any economy, BPOS would be persuasive. In this one, it seems practically essential.” http://www.tomshardware.com/reviews/cloud-computing-bpos,2313.html Nuff said.

Quick heads up note to let you know about two new white papers from the Microsoft Online Services and Global Foundation Services (GFS) teams: · Securing Microsoft’s Cloud Infrastructure . This white paper provides insight into the network of data centers and infrastructure operated by the GFS team...

Nice article from Network World on the City of Carlsbads move to BPOS suite. " Carlsbad went live with Exchange in late March and everything went smoothly from Microsoft's end of things. "You went home Friday as a Groupwise user and you came back Monday as an Exchange user." http://www.networkworld...

The Microsoft Online Services Trial Guide has been published to the Microsoft Download Center . The Trial Guide was written to enhance the trial experience for customers that are considering the Business Productivity Suite. The guide contains step-by-step instructions for several customer scenarios...

SHAREPOINT DESIGNER 2007 IS NOW FREE! SharePoint Designer 2007 is FREE Brief Description SHAREPOINT DESIGNER 2007 IS NOW FREE ! Office SharePoint Designer 2007 provides the powerful tools you need to deliver compelling and attractive SharePoint sites and quickly build workflow-enabled...

You may have noticed that your sign on client was recently updated. That's because BPOS 9.1 was recently released which includes OCS as a new service the deskless worker sku , and international availability. While these three are the big news items, I wanted to bring your attention to a few other updates...

This communcation was recently distributed to account holders: Dear Valued Customer, As we mentioned in our previous e-mail and recent blog post , the next upgrade of Microsoft Online Services is coming soon. During the upgrade, access to the online support ticketing system via the Microsoft Online...

The announcement is out that BPOS is available in several countries. There has been a ton of working on here to roll out these services as fast as possible to countries worldwide. As this is a new service for Microsoft, there has been a learning curve on the various requirement and regulations involved...

Hi, I'm happy to annouce this important document has been published and is available for download. http://www.microsoft.com/downloads/details.aspx?FamilyID=d007f35e-375c-4b11-bc40-bc9082bb224a&displaylang=en It includes many details about exactly what you can and cannot do to extend and...

Hey, I just got word that we're offering some more BPOS deployment and administration courses at specific CPLS learning centers. It's a one day, hands on class that goes over all the details you need to deploy and admin the services. We arleady did a bunch of these, and demand in these cities was...

Hey, my buddy Dan Holmes posted an entry about moving his company to BPOS. Definitly worth reading. http://www.officesharepointpro.com/TabId/149/NodeId/1950/a-microsoft-online-report-card.aspx Quoting from the above: What Microsoft has attained in this first release is an extraordinary, robust...

Now that the services are available, some of you have questions! For Microsoft Partners, you can find technical and business content as well as a Forum just for partners at www.quickstartonlineservices.com/discover Please post questions or requests there as it is closely monitored by moi...