The new Office 365 Service Descriptions can be easily accessed in your favorite browser; just type office365sd.com in the address box, and you'll get a full list of service descriptions.
Each service description will give you tables comparing features across plans, making it easier to pick the plan that suits your needs the best. To provide an easy, visual overview I've compiled the below table comparing Exchange Online, SharePoint Online and Lync Online across the P, M, and E plans.
In the table I'm using these abbriviations for the plans
...and this Color coding visualizing whether a feature is included in the plan or not
Table: Comparing Exchange, SharePoint, and Lync Online across the P, M, and E (and K) plans
(click here to get the source Excel file if you need to do filtering or other tasks)
Note
In the E-plan you can opt to subscibe to various available add-ons, e.g.
See also
On July 19th, 2012 Microsoft Dynamics CRM Online on-boarded to a new administration portal and billing platform. Together the portal and billing platform are referred to as the Microsoft online services environment. This environment is designed to streamline and improve the customer experience across all Microsoft online services. It enables customers to manage their Microsoft Dynamics CRM Online and Office 365 subscriptions from one location and also delivers enhanced regulatory and industry compliance.
Prior to the introduction of this environment, customers who created a subscription using Microsoft Dynamics CRM Online used a different administration portal and billing platform. For the purposes of this article, this legacy platform will be referred to as CTP (Commerce Transaction Platform). This original platform for the service will be decommissioned in the Q4 2013 timeframe, and customers will be moved to Microsoft’s standard administration, billing and provisioning environment for cloud services (the Microsoft online services environment).
I often get asked about the transition experience for customers transitioning from the CTP platform to the Microsoft online services environment.
On the CTP platform users logged into CRM Online using their LiveID credentials, whereas users logging into the Microsoft online services environment are using a different set of credentials - the Microsoft Online Services ID, the unique ID that is required to administer or use Microsoft online services. The Microsoft online services ID can be created when you try or buy a Microsoft Dynamics CRM Online or Office 365 plan for the first time. Alternatively, an administrator creates a new ID when creating a new user.
So how will the transition affect your users of CRM Online
To read more on the topic of credentials and much more on the transition itself you can download the Transition Guide here
In the new Office 365, Mac users can download Office for Mac 2011.
So what to do if you want your Office for Mac now, and your tenant hasn't yet been upgraded to the new Office 365 experience?
If your are an existing Office 365 E-plan customer, and your tenant hasn't yet been upgraded to the new Office 365 experience, your tenant is in what we call Pre-Upgrade. Pre-upgrade Office 365 tenants will not expose links to end users for Office for Mac 2011.
However, if you want to use Office for Mac 2011 with Office 365 activation, you can download the DMG installation package from this link. That will download an English-US version of Office for Mac 2011 SP3 which will activate against an Office 365 tenant Pre- or Post-Upgrade for users with rights to Office Professional Plus or Office 365 ProPlus desktop apps.
These will also count against the five installations per user and the interface to manage deactivation of Office apps will be available to users once pre-upgrade tenants have been upgraded.
Companies who have gone through a merger often need to have separate Global Address Lists (GAL) per company, with functionality that allows users to see only other appropriate users.
Schools often need different views of the GAL for subsets of users within the same organization - restrict students’ access to GAL to avoid misuse.
To mirror the GAL segmentation functionality available in on-premises Exchange Server, Address Book Policies (ABP) have added to Exchange Online in Office 365 - and there are a few things to notice:
With the December 2012 Service update (aka "Polaris"), we introduced the ability for customers to provision and manage multiple CRM instances within a single subscription.
This opens up new enterprise customer scenarios such as separate instances for departmental use, regional use, development/test instances for application lifecycle management and more.
Use Case for Multiple Instances
Logically, you can imagine multiple CRM Online instances for an organization structured similar to multi-tenant high-rise or building. Each floor within a building can be logically considered as an application (Sales/Service, Vendor mgmt., Wealth mgmt., etc) and each unit within a floor can be considered as an instance for a specific purpose such as production (final), training, testing, development, etc.
The need for multiple instances varies from one organization to another. Some organizations might require just a few and others might need large number of instances depending upon their business needs.
It is important to note that multiple instances cannot be created across the globe. Currently, all the additional instances can only be created within the same geo (Americas, EMEA or APAC) as the subscription.
Scenario: Departmental Use
So - why would an organization need multiple instances of CRM Online if data segregation can be achieved using business units and role-based forms?
A common use for additional instances is to have separate instances for each department or region within an organization. For example a large financial organization might need separate instances for retail banking division, wealth management vision, separate ones for insurance business and vendor mgmt., etc. Another example might be to have separate instances for different regions (Northwest, South, East, etc) as the policies and business procedures might significantly vary from one region to another within the same organization.
Multiple instances are needed when segregation of plugins/workflows/admin resources are required which cannot be easily isolated using business units in CRM. In the below example - when Retail banking needs to make a change or install a 3rd party component for their needs, you wouldn’t want the wealth management users to be affected by those changes.
Additional instances are charged at a monthly rate per instance and do not require additional CRM user licenses (CALs). Each user with a CRM license can access all of the instances in their subscription. When a user is part of multiple instances, they’ll see an instance picker while logging into CRM Online. Security can also be applied to restrict users only to specific instances.
Instance Security Groups
Security groups defined within the Microsoft Online Services Portal (MOSP) controls access to various CRM Online instances. Any security group available within the MOSP can be used to control access to a CRM instance. If a security group is not associated with a CRM instance, all users with a CRM license will be created as users in the instance. If a security group is associated with an instance, only users with CRM licenses that are members of the security group will be created as users in the CRM instance
Security groups can also be nested, meaning one security group can encompass other security groups making it easy to map complex security and access requirements that is illustrated in the slide. For example, you can easily create an “All Sales” group that includes Corporate, Field Management and Field Sales/Service groups.
Administrators can view and create security groups within the MOSP. If you have configured your subscription for Active Directory synchronization, security groups you create in Active Directory will be replicated to the MOSP and can be associated with your CRM Online instance for simplified integration. Of course security groups within Active Directory can be used for controlling access to other products such as SharePoint, network shares and other applications making it easier to achieve end-to-end enterprise security.
Important reminders regarding the Additional Instance Add-On: 1. Additional instances can only be added to "paid" subscriptions (not trials or IURs) 2. Existing trials and/or subscriptions cannot be merged onto an Additional Instance; instead, the customer or partner will need to move their data and customizations 3. If the customer purchased their CRM Online subscription through Volume Licensing, they must go through their LAR to purchase the Additional Instance 4. Storage is shared across the primary subscription and any purchased Additional Instances 5. Separate security groups can be set up for each Additional Instance
To learn how see the whitepaper "The Connected Enterprise: Embracing social technologies to drive the Dynamic Business."
Update Post Convergence March 22, 2013 - Microsoft aquired NetBreeze a social listener application, which will bring a lot of capabilities to CRM
Below you'll see a screenshot of how we could embed this functionality in Microsoft Dynamics CRM down the line.
Exchange Online provides the following rich features that can help your end users easily collaborate in email:
Each of these features has a different user experience and feature set and should be used based on what the user needs to accomplish and what your organization can provide.
For example, site mailboxes provide great documentation collaboration features. However, site mailboxes rely on SharePoint, so if you aren’t planning on subscribing to SharePoint, you can use public folders to share documents.
So what is the difference between site mailboxes, public folders, shared mailboxes, and distribution groups?
Site mailboxes
Public folders
Shared mailboxes
Distribution groups
A table of comparison could look like this:
Read more here
The new SharePoint Online, available with Office 365, includes a wide variety of improvements and new features.
Discover how SharePoint Online can help you share your work and work with others, organize your projects and teams and discover people and information.
Share
Organize
Discover
Build
Manage
Read more here.
Administration Center
On top of the above you might also want to check out how you as an Admin can automate SharePoint Online management tasks using remote Windows PowerShell, e.g. create a bunch of sites from code.
See the article "The new SharePoint Online Administration Center—more customer control" here
If you’re part of a Microsoft Dynamics CRM Online organization and you choose to install product updates, you have the option to integrate Yammer into your sales and service processes.
You can stay up to date with the records you care about and hold conversations with your colleagues without navigating away from the work area. When you follow a record, changes to it will trigger a notification on your screen. You’ll be able to look up this information later, along with your conversations, right in the record.
We've released a video in which you can see how the above could play out for your organisation.
Click here to see the video