Hey,
Our new community guy Jim Glynn has been busy and getting some good technical content posted.
Since the services are being updated all the time, it's a good idea to get into a habit of refreshing what you know. Important changes are alwasy being added that open new opportunites for partners and customers.
Check out this list of webcasts now avaiable:
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 file you can use that provides guidance on how to you can view as well. The certainly goes into the "must have" list of tools for BPOS partners and customers that support the services.
The guys as Messagops have released a script that can notify deskless workers when their BPOS password is about to expire. Since BPOS Deskless workers use OWA rathe rthan Outloook, this is a very hand capability.
See the post at http://www.messageops.com/blog/index.php?/archives/10-Microsoft-Online-Password-Expiration-Notification-Script.html
-brett
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 partners to find out everything they need to know about BPOS and includes marketing, technical, a replica of this blog, discussion board and detail rich Wiki on virtually every aspect of the services. This is a MUST KNOW resource for BPOS partners.
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 Exchange and SharePoint online!
Enjoy!
-brett
Overview of Exchange Online can be accessed via MPN/PLC at the following direct recording link: https://training.partner.microsoft.com/learning/app/management/LMS_ActDetails.aspx?UserMode=0&ActivityId=569860
Overview of SharePoint Online can be accessed via MPN/PLC at the following direct recording link:
https://training.partner.microsoft.com/learning/app/management/LMS_ActDetails.aspx?UserMode=0&ActivityId=569885
BPOS Compete can be accessed via MPN/PLC at the following direct recording link:
https://training.partner.microsoft.com/learning/app/management/LMS_ActDetails.aspx?UserMode=0&ActivityId=570185
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 with skills necessary to quickly get an account up and running on BPOS, deploy the sign in tool and administer the services. Designed for IT Professionals, this class is insures that administrators know the core deployment scenarios for each service and includes domain name validation, creating users, accessing and managing each service. While considered an overview class, it is full of useful details covering the core scenarios for each service.
Course Description
This refactored class includes the latest updates to the services and covers :
· Subscribing to and Activating Microsoft Online Services
· Getting Started with the Microsoft Online Administration Center
· Accessing Business Productivity Online Services
· E-mail Migration and Active Directory Coexistence
· Exchange Online Administration and Capabilities
· Managing and Using Microsoft SharePoint Online
· Administering Microsoft Office Communications Online
· Administering Office Live Meeting Standard
Value
Provides a means for Partners to quickly get up to speed on the capabilities of the services and covers the core administration tasks required to manage the services. This class is focused on insuring that students know the main features of each service, how to deploy the sign on tool, validate custom domains, and have an understanding of migration and directory synchronization. At the end of the class students should be able to successfully configure and manage a BPOS account. Additional training is suggested before undertaking migration. (See the Migration and Onboarding class on the Partner Learning Center for depth training on migration)
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 students with the knowledge and skills to identify key technical issues needed to move an organization to Microsoft Online Services. As previously announced, the course content is also available as ILT as described below.
Course Description
Day one - Detailed Presales discovery and migration planning
· Detailed walkthrough of pre-sales discovery and activity
· Best practices for a trial account
· Domain name configuration
· SharePoint, and Exchange discovery questions
· Single Sign on tool deployment and workstation preparation
Day two – Migration and Directory Synch deep dive
· Deep dive into directory synchronization and migration
· Capacities and limitations of migration tools
· Using powershell commands to troubleshoot migration
· 3rd party migration scenarios
Value
Provides all the information most commonly needed to successfully plan and execute migration to Business Productivity Online Suite. Students are guided through a detailed explanation of pre-deployment questions leading to an exploration of our directory synchronization and migration tools. At the end of this class, students will know what they need to ask customers to inform a high quality migration as well as how to execute messaging migration to Exchange Online.
Hi,
Jenna Leday is presenting a webcast on Migrating to BPOS on Dec 17th 2009, 11AM PST. Please click here to register.
Jenna is PM on the BPOS team that manages the migration toolkit and powershell commands recently released (see previous blog post). She's the de-facto go-to girl for technical details on migration tool so don't miss this rare opporunity.
· Options for creating users in BPOS
· Maintaining mailflow continuity
· How to define the scope of the data you’re moving
· Post migration steps
Presenter:
Jenna Lyday
Program Manager, Microsoft
The Webinar is Dec 17th 2009, 11AM PST. Please click here to register.
MessageOps has posted an applicaiton for monitoring Exchange Online. This looks like a useful tool for identyfing latency issues.
Keep an eye on these guys!
http://www.messageops.com/ExmonDownload.html
There is a document on microsoft.com/downloads called Guidance for Microsoft Online Services Multinational Customers is not what it seems. You don't have to be a multinational to be interested in the details such as latency stats between you and the BPOS data center. In addition, there is an online ping tool that will tell you your latency between the browser and any of our data centers and provides guiance for whats acceptable.
Add this to your list of BPOS technical reference materials
http://www.microsoft.com/downloads/details.aspx?displaylang=en&FamilyID=c4ec4bbe-5979-4cf2-bac5-d86e1baada2c
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 platform. The Mac Sign-In application was announced with the October Service Update as part of the expanded Mac support for the Business Productivity Online Suite, and the application was made available as part of a preview program for early adoption and testing.
More information about the expanded support for Mac can be found in the Microsoft Online Services Macintosh Support Service Description, which also can be downloaded from the Microsoft Download Center.
Wanted to let you know that there will be a new webinar series starting up.
You will definitly want to attend these to get the latest information on migrating to BPOS.
See http://blogs.technet.com/msonline/archive/2009/11/13/announcing-the-migration-webinar-series.aspx for details.
-brett
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 and Singapore, corresponding to the commercial availability for customers in those countries
Customers globally who visit the microsoft.com/online home page are being “geo-detected,” where possible, by their browser language setting and IP address – then are redirected automatically to the appropriate corresponding subsidiary site. At all times on all of our Web pages, customers have the opportunity to change the locale they wish to view.
This is the list of localized sites that were published previously:
Ran across this blog post on integrating BPOS with BPOS. Useful info.
http://blogs.msdn.com/dynamicscrmonline/archive/2009/05/19/crm-online-and-bpos-business-productivity-online-suite.aspx
Also, you might be interested to know that the SMTP gateway in CRM has been updated to work with Exchange Online
There are some settings in the sing on tool such as "save password" on the options tab that are stored in the registry. As such, they can set using group policy. There is a .ADM file to assist in this process located at http://blogs.technet.com/msonline/archive/2009/02/09/microsoft-online-sign-in-client-adm-group-policy-object.aspx . While unsupported, this file could be quite helpful when configuring sign on client settings using group policy.
-brett
