Lync Online is available in three stand-alone plans (Plan 1, Plan 2 and Plan 3) - as well as part of the Office 365 packaged plans (the P and E plans). See the below chart for more information on which Lync Online plan are included in which packaged plan
(click the picture for the larger image)
See also
Office 365 users wanted a better, more connected and governed experience when it came to working with PDF files within SharePoint Online document libraries.
Thanks to your direct comments and active voices in the Community forums, PDF files will now open directly into Adobe Reader without requiring that it be downloaded first. The PDF remains connected and stored in your SharePoint Online document library as you view and edit the file. You can even check it out like other Office documents.
After the SharePoint Online environment has been updated, users must have the latest Adobe Reader version (10.1.2) installed: http://get.adobe.com/reader/
This update is part of the second update to SharePoint Online (SPO) since the launch of Office 365 (O365). The updates are now beginning to roll out worldwide. Read all about them on the official blog of the Microsoft SharePoint Product Group - link
See also: "PDF Files in SharePoint Online" - link
As part of Office 365, SharePoint Online lets you create sites to share your documents and information, making it easy to work together with colleagues and customers. Team Sites give you and your team a place to work together on documents, critical tasks, and events - you can keep your teams in sync and manage important projects. With Intranet Sites you can easily find important documents and people, participate in discussion forums, and access routine business processes - you can keep everyone up to date on company news and information.
To learn how to get the most out of SharePoint Online you can watch this recorded How-To series:
A shared mailbox is a great way to implement department mailboxes, shared calendars and lots of other things. On the web you'll find several detailed step-by-steps for setting up shared mailboxes:
Before you go through those steps you should make a note of a couple of things to be aware of:
When done with the creation of the Shared Mailbox, creation of a Security Group, adding members to the group, and setting permissions (all described in the above listed step-by-step instructions) you can open the new shared mailbox in either Outlook Web App (OWA) or Microsoft Outlook 2010 (Outlook):
Thanks to the recent update of Lync Server 2010, Microsoft Lync Online users can now record meetings, conferencing sessions, and calls. To take advantage of this new feature, your Lync Online administrator must enable recording for your organization.
The cumulative update for Microsoft Lync Server 2010 – January 2012 includes changes to the administration of Microsoft Lync Online for Microsoft Office 365. This update includes enhancements to user search functionality, presence privacy, mobile phone notifications, and call and conferencing recording.
Maybe you are considering moving to Exchange Online in Office 365 and would like to know how much Internet bandwidth will be required to support your Exchange clients after the migration is completed?
The new Exchange Client Bandwidth Calculator Beta is now available for download.
The Calculator
Downloads
The Microsoft BPOS–S to Office 365 Transition Guide for Enterprises is intended to help you understand the requirements and work streams for transitioning your organization from Microsoft Business Productivity Online Standard Suite (BPOS–S) to Microsoft Office 365 for enterprises, using the automated Microsoft transition process.
This transition of your production tenant moves user data and settings to their functional equivalents in Office 365, while maintaining service to your users throughout the change.
As an enterprise IT administrator running a BPOS–S tenant (e.g., over 1000 users), you should understand that there are multiple work streams required in your organization in order to smoothly achieve transition. The more sophisticated your IT systems are, the more work will be required to confidently complete the work streams. This document is designed to help you determine and plan the work streams necessary in transition strategy.
This document is offered as a complement to existing information sources and does not replace the Microsoft Office 365 Deployment Guide for Enterprises (MODG), or the Office 365 Service Descriptions that are already published.
Click here to download the document
See also SharePoint Online Post-Transition Guide - link
To be allowed into Office 365 a user needs to be authenticated. Authentication means verifying that the user is who he/she claims to be. Once authenticated we can decide what actions the user is authorized to perform in Office 365.
Identity management deals with identifying individuals in a system and controlling access to the resources in that system.
In Office 365 we support three core customer scenarios for identity management:
Different benefits and limitations exist for these three core scenarios (see also 'Key terminology' at the end of this article):
1. Cloud IDsWith Microsoft Online Services cloud IDs (Cloud Identity), user credentials for signing into Office 365 services are stored in the cloud
Benefits
Limitations
2. Cloud IDs with directory synchronization For larger organizations that may want to streamline provisioning, the Microsoft Online Services Directory Synchronization Tool can be used to replicate existing Active Directory user accounts (and other Active Directory objects) into the Office 365 Cloud ID. Unlike manually created accounts, accounts created by the Directory Synchronization Tool are fully populated with user account information from Active Directory (for example, department, and phone number).
3. Federated IDs with directory synchronizationFederated IDs (Federated Identity) is a more sophisticated approach for larger organizations. In companies with Federated Identity set up, users can sign into Office 365 services using their Active Directory credentials. The corporate Active Directory authenticates the users, and stores and controls the password policy. With federated Identity, credentials are authenticated by on premises Active Directory Federation Services 2.0 server and a logon token is obtained by the user so that the Office 365 sign-in service can verify them. While this model may require some server investments and deeper architectural decision making, it does allows support for richer single sign on with your corporate credentials, integration with on-premises multi-factor authentication and a configurable password policy.
Sign-On Experience with Federated ID
End-users can use their AD credentials to access online resources, through ADFS. The experience they have will vary depending on the client types, access methods (inside or outside corporate network) and whether the device has joined the domain
See the Office 365 Identity Service Description "Signing In to Office 365" section for more information
To learn more about these Identity Management options you can go to the Office 365 Community Wiki “Office 365 Identity Management”
Key terminology
The SharePoint Developer Team has just released a work in progress - a large-scale static diagram of a subset of the classes in the SharePoint object model hierarchy available in sandbox solutions. At this time the diagram does not reflect the relationship between the classes, but it does provide a useful general reference for how the major classes of the SharePoint namespace are structured.
See the SharePoint Developer Team blog for more and/or download the diagram here