Today we released the first major service update to Office 365.
Amongst other things this is our first update to SharePoint Online (SPO) since the launch of Office 365 and we thought it would be a good time to share information about the new features and fixes available as part of this service update.
On a broad level, this update
But there’s a lot more - read all about the new features and fixes here
We often get the question: "For Office 365 organizations in a hybrid Exchange deployment (some users on-premises, some users in Exchange Online), what Free/Busy viewing and Calendar sharing options are available?"
In the below table you'll see whats avaliable in an organisation with a mix of Exchange Server On-Prem (2010 SP1 or 2007 SP2 or 2003 SP2) and Exchange Online (Office 365)
Note 3: Exchange 2010 RTM coexistence with Exchange Online (Office 365) is not supported. Note 4: All scenarios require Rich Coexistence for free/busy information viewing to be possible. Simple Coexistence provides no free/busy viewing.
See also: "Exchange Calendaring Sharing Matrix" - link
Many are asking if they can make use of centralized auto signatures in Exchange Online in Office 365. The answer is yes - and its done using Disclaimers.
To automatically apply disclaimers to e-mail messages, you use Transport Rules. You create Transport Rules in the Exchange Control Panel - just click Manage My Organization > Mail Control > Rules and start building the desired rule.
Clicking New will present you with a dialog in which you can specify that you want the new rule to fire on all messages and you want it to append a disclaimer to evey message.
Next up is specifying the appropriate text in the disclaimer. The disclaimer text can include HTML tags and you can add user attributes to disclaimers. For example, you can add DisplayName, FirstName, LastName, Department, and Company to create personalized signatures. Here is an example of a (very) basic disclaimer:
DisplayName
FirstName
LastName
Department
Company
When the disclaimer is added to the message, the attribute names are replaced by the corresponding values from the sender's user account.
Testing the disclamer
Compose a message (with no signature to begin with - will be inserted by the transport rule)
The recipient sees the message with the signature inserted by the Transport Rule:
Here is more on how to build your own centralized auto signatures - Link
Bonus info: Loryan Stant (Office 365 MVP) elaborates a bit on the variables and an exception you can apply - link
As described in an earlier blog post SharePoint Online comes with a very useful template "Express Team Site", from which you can easily fire up Office documents by clicking the built in icons (see below). Default behavior is that the document opens in the Office rich client if such is installed on the PC. If no Office is installed on the PC, the document will open up in Office Web Apps.
Some of you are perhaps wondering if you can in fact force the latter - make the documents open up in Office Web Apps no matter what. It can be done by disabling an add-on in IE (see how to further down in this blog post).
If you disable this add-on the behavior will change as follows:
1. Open your Express Team Site, and click e.g. the Word icon
2. Now instead of being taken to the Word rich app installed on the PC, you remain in the browser and are prompted for a file name
3. After typing in a document name and clicking OK, Word Web Apps opens
4. After saving and closing you are back in the doc lib.
Here is how to obtain the above
1. Open IE and click "Manage add-ons" in the "Tools" menu
2. Click "All add-ons" (lower left corner)
3. Locate the "SharePoint OpenDocuments Class" add-on and disable it
Thats it. Thanks to Ryan Phillips for hinting.
See also
The long awaited Business Connectivity Services has entered our Office 365 E3 (and E4) tenants.
Business Connectivity Services bridges the gap between SharePoint sites and other web services, databases, and external business applications. It enables SharePoint to create read and write connections to external data in lists, and to display external information in Web Parts. Imagine being able to consume and update e.g ERP data from within SharePoint Online.
It represents a very important option for you to explore and benefit from.
[NOTE: BCS within SharePoint Online does not support a direct connection to SQL Azure. A WCF endpoint is required. See this blog for guidance]
See also:
Did you know – SharePoint Online in Office 365 comes with a site template called “Express Team Site”. It’s a very fast and snappy way to get at team site up and running. And best of all: the preconfigured document library “Documents” comes preconfigured with icons for easy launching of new documents (Word, Excel, PowerPoint and OneNote)
How to:
Note
Unfortunately, the first time ever you create a document from the document library it opens a local copy. To save the document back to the document library do a Save As, paste the URL (see step 5 above) into the “File name.”, hit Enter and provide a name for the new document. The next time you create a document using the document library these step won’t be necessary – the URL is cached :-)
Many customers who have implemented our federated SSO feature have asked us to enable more control over external access based on the location of the client e.g. limit access to Microsoft Office 365 services, depending on where the client (trying to access the Office 365 services) resides.
While this feature is officially on the roadmap for the first half of calendar year 2012, it is available now to customers as a QFE (hotfix) via KB2607496 and is fully documented on TechNet. The feature will move to officially released with the next service pack for AD FS but has already been pilot tested with 12 customers. In short the new capability allows customers to:
Many potential customers are asking about departmental mailboxes in Office 365. How can a department, a team etc share a mailbox, and does it involve a license?
Shared mailboxes in Office 365 Exchange Online allow a group of users to view and send e-mail from a common mailbox.
A shared mailbox:
In Office 365 Exchange Online, shared mailboxes are created only via Remote PowerShell. See the article "A couple of tips for setting up Shared Mailboxes" - link for more details. Update March 26th 2012 - new GUI based tool for creating Shared Mailboxes
Note 1 -- From an Exchange perspective a shared mailbox is just a 5GB mailbox provisioned to a disabled user account (and delegated to a bunch of SG/Users). So when reaching the quota, mailbox will start receiving warning messages (10% prior to the quota) and then will start blocking mail sent from it (if “send as” as been granted and ‘from” used) and finally it will refuse accepted new e-mail (with “mailbox is full” in the NDR).
In Office 365 your password will expire every 90 days (unless your admin has changed the policy). If you are using Outlook Web App (or other online apps), you'll receive directions to change your password when it is about to expire or has expired. But if you are solely using the rich apps (e.g. Outlook 2010) you won’t get a notification. You might end up in a situation where your rich app fail to authenticate without indicating the true cause and you call support. This has changed with the upgraded Microsoft Office 365 Sign-In Assistant application (MOS SIA) downloadable from here.The new version of MOS SIA will give you a password expiry notification bubble from the Windows tray every day within the last 2 weeks before your password will expire. Clicking the notification bubble redirects to you to the Office 365 portal so you can reset your password.
Updates for MOS SIA are provided through Microsoft Update. Updates can be obtained directly from the Microsoft Update service or in managed environments through Windows Software Update Services (WSUS).