Understanding storage allocations in SharePoint Online can be a bit confusing. If we look at the storage allocations for the E and P plans....
Topic
E plan
P1 plan
Storage (pooled)
10 GB base customer storage plus 500 MB per enterprise user
10 GB base customer storage plus 500 MB per user
Storage per Kiosk Worker
0
N/A
Storage per external user
Additional storage
Available at a cost per gigabyte (GB) per month. See this blog post for more.
Site collection storage quotas
Up to 100 gigabytes (GB) per site collection
35 GB
My Site storage allocation(individual) (1)
500 MB of personal storage per My Site (once provisioned) (2)
Total storage per tenant
Up to 25 TB per tenant
(1) does not count against tenant‘s overall storage pool(2) the storage amount on individual’s My Site storage cannot be adjusted
...we see that there are two kinds of storage allocations - pooled and individual.
Pooled Storage - As seen in the above table each customer tenant in SPO receives a default amount of 10GB of storage. Users under K plans and external users do not contribute to the pooled storage. Currently, pooled storage has a 25TB limit in the E plan (35GB for the P1 plan)
Individual Storage - End users who get a My Site (E1-4 SKUs – P1 SKU doesn’t include My Site) receive 500MB of personal (individual) storage when they first self-provision their MySite (when they click the "Content" tab of their My Site). This storage is in addition to the pooled storage allocated to the customer tenant per USL, but is not aggregated.
Example Scenarios:
See also
Finding your way around the vast amount of information sources can be time consuming. The below list of documents is what I would call the essential documents if you want to start your Office 365 journey.
You might also want to visit the below sites frequently:
If you - like me - spend a great deal of your day doing calendar juggling, you might be interested in the Calendar Publishing feature in Office 365. There is a lot of time saved if your external contacts can check your calendar for available time slots before they go on and send you a meeting request.
Calendar Publishing is done from the Outlook Calendar in Exchange Online using the 'Publish This Calender To Internet' feature.
For newer Office 365 tenants this feature is enabled by default for all users in the tenant (the tenant admin can disable it or change default sharing policy if desired). For older tenants it is disabled and need to be enabled for all users by the tenant admin using Windows PowerShell.
Enabling the feature using PowerShell
Start Windows PowerShell (Run as Administrator) and go through these cmdlets:
A few notes on the cmdlets:
After completing the PowerShell commands you should now see the "Publish This Calendar to Internet..." command enabled in your Outlook calendar
Publish your calender
To start sharing your calendar you need to go through a couple of actions in your Outlook calendar:
Enjoy
Office 365 was recently awarded the best Cloud Application of 2011 by CRN, who "found it to be uber-flexible and compelling. It’s the real deal, and it blows away Google Apps"
Many of our customers have gone through competitive evaluations and then selected the Microsoft Cloud. Each customer has his or her own reasons, could be price, could be capabilities, could be privacy, could be file integrity, all of the above or something else.
If you'd like to see how a "Day in the Life of a Salesperson" could turn out in two scenarios (Office 365 vs Google Apps) take a look at this comparion. A busy account representative is juggling her workload to make time for a sales opportunity. First, she is rattled by issues managing calendars and syncing Gmail. Later, having endured the frustration of building a presentation without familiar tools or even a spell checker, she is daunted in not being able to open the presentation as she travels to the customer site with limited Wi-Fi access. Face to face with her client, she damages her credibility after using Google Apps again. It introduced formatting changes in printing handouts!
See also:
Certifications are a great way to verify and document your skills. To help you certify your Office 365 skills we're releasing two exams soon (expected in april 2012)
Exam 70-323: Administering Office 365 intended for IT professionals who administer Microsoft Office 365 in an environment that may include Microsoft Exchange, Microsoft Lync, and/or Microsoft SharePoint - link
Exam 70-321: Deploying Office 365 intended for consultants and IT professionals who plan and implement Office 365. This includes migrations to Office 365 (simple and hybrid deployments) - link
Passing these two exams will give you two certifications:
Currently no preparation materials have been published, but a good starting point would be the virtual labs on the (great) new Office 365 TechCenter, your new one-stop for all the technical info on Office 365
UPDATE July 2012. Recently two on-demand online preparation courses has been published:
UPDATE2 August 2012. New “Exam 74-324: Administering Office 365 for Small Business” introduced
Note: as a Microsoft Partner you might want to take a look at the Office 365 Practice Accelerator - a great help in building a practice around Office 365. 4x4 hours training available for you now!
Perhaps you are looking at the Cloud (Office 365) for a convenient place for email archiving. With the introduction of Office 365, Exchange Hosted Archiving (EHA) was replaced by Exchange Online Archive (EOA).
EOA is a solution for associating a cloud-based archive with an on-premises primary Exchange mailbox.
So what if you are an Exchange Online (Office 365) subscriber and want a cloud-based archive for your cloud-based primary mailbox?
Exchange Online provides built-in archiving capabilities, including a personal archive that gives you a convenient place to store older emails. A personal archive is a specialized mailbox that appears alongside your primary mailbox folder in Outlook or Outlook Web App. You can access the archive in the same way you access your primary mailbox. In addition, you can search both your personal archive and your primary mailbox. Read more about personal archives in the "Microsoft Exchange Online for Enterprises Service Description" under the header "Personal Archive" and how to "Enable an Archive Mailbox" here
Plan E3 and E4 includes unlimited archive. You'll be able to add unlimited archive to your E1, E2 and K users as an add-on.
To help you reduce the liabilities associated with your email and other communications, Exchange Online offers two types of retention policies: archive policies and delete policies. For guidance on how to set-up and manage retention policies in Exchange Online, see this article.
You now have a one-stop location to learn about new features as they are introduced into the Office 365 service. The new ‘Office 365 Service Updates’ wiki on the Office 365 Community site lists new features with short descriptions and links to additional helpful content. Service information is also broken out so you can find the updates most relevant to your plan (P or E).
For example, did you know that we recently:
Read all about these and many more updates as they happen on the wikis - link
The Kiosk worker offering in Office 365 (aka the K-plan) is designed for the user that doesn’t have messaging and collaboration today. It is a low cost way of giving you a common platform for communicating with employees such as 'deskless' workers, shift workers or retail store employees who use shared PCs
The value proposition is already great (prices starting at USD 2 per user per month for the Exchange Online Kiosk Plan) - but new exciting Office 365 changes to the K-plan brings you increased value:
EAS is designed for the synchronization of email, contacts, calendar, tasks and notes from a messaging server to a mobile device, where as POP is limited to e-mail only.
For workers on the road most of their day (e.g. district nurses or home helpers, helping elderly people in their homes) the above changes obvisously will add a lot of increased functionality if they have a smartphone, e.g. being able maintain to an updated schedule in their calenders, set reminders via tasks a.s.o.
Many customers began their Office 365 journey populating the online AD (in their Office 365 tenant) using the directory synchronization tool (dirsync). For reasons of their own some customers decide to turn off (deactivate) dirsync after completing the initial sync.
A few customers later on re-think and decide to turn dirsync back on (reactivate dirsync). It’s important to understand the implications of reactivating directory synchronization in this scenario, especially if changes/edits have been made to the user properties while they where managed in the cloud. When user administration is transferred from the cloud back to the customers on-premises organization directory data loss can occur.
To learn more I encourage you to read through this article "Directory synchronization and source of authority" on TechNet.
You might also want to familiarize yourself with the “List of attributes that are synchronized to Office 365 and attributes that are written back to the on-premises Active Directory Domain Services” - link
See also: "Office 365 Jump Start (05): Microsoft Office 365 Directory Synchronization" - link
Many Exchange customers wants to move away from PSTs and take advantage of the expanded storage and compliance capabilities in the latest version of Exchange.
A new, free and downloadable tool called the "PST Capture tool" is (hopefully) entering (maybe private) beta soon.
With this tool you as an administrator will be able to scan repositories such as your network file shares to discover PST files, match the found PST files against your users mailboxes, and import data in the PSTs into the Exchange Store (Office 365 Exchange Online or On-Premises).
Note: the tool is not expected to convert (rewrite) X500 addresses to SMTP addresses - think of it more as a copy function as opposed to rewriting
Update Jan 30. 2012: the tool is now released and you can read all about it, see a video and download it here
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Update Apr 29. 2013: Microsoft Exchange PST Capture 2.0 released in February 2013. Several improvements, most notably the UI is no longer limited to 1,000 users when performing an online import
Other improvements made in PST Capture 2.0 include:
See "PST Capture 2.0 is now available" for more
Existing Microsoft Business Productivity Online Standard Suite (BPOS) customers are being transitioned by the our transition team to Microsoft Office 365. During this transition the Microsoft Transition team will move all existing BPOS SharePoint Online site collections to Office 365 per tenant.
For information about how to prepare for this transition, see the "Microsoft Online Services transition center" - link.
If your BPOS SharePoint Tenant was recently transitioned to Office 365, there may be steps you need to take to resolve some common issues that can happen - see the "SharePoint Online Post-Transition Guide: BPOS to Office 365" for more information - link
See also BPOS to Office 365 Transition Guide from february 2012 - link
More and more people are looking at sharing or storing Word documents in the cloud, be it the Microsoft cloud or other vendors cloud, e.g. Google Documents. Of course it is important that an existing Word documents from a users desktop look identical when the user share it in the cloud.
To test this out we saved the same Word file on Office 365 SharePoint Online (Word Web App) and Google Apps. You can check out the demo yourself. For your convenience we have circled and highlighted key file integrity differences when viewing the file through Word Web App and viewing it with Google Documents.
Mind you - the missing elements are gone forever when you reverse the action (if someone downloades the document to their desktop)