Some great sessions on Office 365 from TechEd 2011 North America:

• Overview
  • Microsoft Office 365: The Future of Productivity, Eron Kelly
  • Microsoft SharePoint Online Overview, Mark Kashman
  • Microsoft Lync 2010: In the Cloud, Ziv Fass
• Developer
  • Collaboration in the Cloud with SharePoint: A New World of Productivity, Eron Kelly
  • Developing Collaboration Solutions in the Cloud with Microsoft SharePoint Online, Chris Mayo
  • Developing Powerful Workflows in the Cloud with Microsoft SharePoint Online, Chris Mayo
  • Exploring the Office Developer Story in Microsoft Office 365, Tanuj Bansal
  • Four Ways to Leverage the Microsoft Lync 2010 Client APIs in Your Applications, Marcello Farjalla
  • Top 10 Insights on Development of Microsoft Exchange Server and Microsoft Lync Server 2010 against Microsoft Office 365, Albert Kooiman
• IT Pro
  • Microsoft Office 365: Deployment Overview, Zach Beers
  • What Do Existing BPOS Customers Need to Do to Prepare for Microsoft Office 365?, Michael O'Neill
  • Microsoft Office 365: Identity and Access Solutions, Ross Adams
  • Microsoft Office 365: Directory Synchronization, Jono Luk
  • Deploying Microsoft Office Professional Plus Subscription, Brian Shiers
  • Microsoft Exchange Online in Microsoft Office 365: Simple Migration Live!, Ram Poomalinga

Office 365 Training Course on MSDN: The course includes 7 sessions, over 10 hours of video, and 16 labs as both an offline training kit as well as an online training course on MSDN.

Getting Your Own Office 365 Beta Account: Sign up at http://office365.com to get access to the Beta.

The next version of the Microsoft Deployment Toolkit - version 2012 - is available for beta download since a few weeks. To participate, register for MDT 2012 Beta 1 at Microsoft Connect.

Microsoft Deployment Toolkit (MDT) 2012 Beta 1 rides the next wave of System Center releases with support for System Center Configuration Manager 2012. For Lite Touch installations, MDT 2012 improves the overall client-side user experience, while also providing behind-the-scenes enhancements for partitioning, UEFI, and user state migration. These features, combined with many small enhancements, bug fixes, and a smooth and simple upgrade process, make MDT 2012 Beta 1 more reliable and flexible than ever.

Key benefits include:

• Fully leverages the capabilities provided by System Center Configuration Manager 2012 for OS deployment
• Improved Lite Touch user experience and functionality
• A smooth and simple upgrade process for all existing MDT users

New features include:

For System Center Configuration Manager customers:

• Support for Configuration Manager 2012 (while still supporting Configuration Manager 2007)

For Lite Touch Installation:

• More flexible partitioning
• Enhanced client-side user experience
• Integrated UEFI deployment capabilities
• New “Deploy to VHD” scenario

For all customers:

• Improved user state migration process
• Many small enhancements and bug fixes

Tell the MDT team what you think! To participate in the MDT 2012 Beta 1 program, download and test the tool in your environment and then provide timely feedback and suggestions to our development team. MDT 2012 Beta 1 runs through August 2011. Please submit your feedback through Connect and direct any support questions you may have to satfdbk@microsoft.com. Thank you for taking the time to help improve the MDT product feature and functions.

Next steps:

• Join MDT 2012 Beta 1 and tell the MDT team what you think!
• Help spread the word – share the beta invitation link with your friends.
• Send your comments to the MDT Team.
• Learn more about the MDT.

Get the latest tips from Microsoft Solution Accelerators—in 140 characters or less! Follow the team on Twitter: @MSSolutionAccel.

The “VHD Test Drive - Lync Server 2010” download comes as a pre-configured set of VHD's and enables you to fully evaluate Microsoft Lync Server 2010.

Microsoft Lync Server 2010 combined with Microsoft Exchange 2010 SP1 Unified Messaging and Microsoft SharePoint Server 2010 delivers a fresh, intuitive user experience that brings together the different ways people communicate and collaborate in a single user interface. This unified experience facilitates rapid user adoption, while the ability to support a full range of communications from a single platform reduces both capital and operational costs.

Download this fully configured virtual machine set of the latest release to evaluate Microsoft Lync Server 2010, and discover the full power of the Microsoft Business Productivity Platform. This VHD set enables real-time communications and collaboration using presence, instant messaging, enterprise voice and video, conferencing and application sharing, as well as features like Unified Messaging and Skill Search powered by Microsoft Exchange Server and Microsoft SharePoint Server.

A few weeks ago, Ian Hameroff announced on his Exchange Partner Marketing blog that the Unified Communication competency in the Microsoft Partner Network (MPN) will split to become the Messaging competency and the Communications competency in October 2011. The Messaging competency is for solutions partners who want to broaden their business portfolios to sell, deploy, and support Microsoft Exchange and solutions built on the Exchange platform. The Communications competency is for solutions partners who want to broaden their business portfolios to sell, deploy, and support Microsoft Lync or to build products and solutions on or interoperable with the Lync platform.

Read more about it on Ian’s blog post or visit the UC Competency page on MPN.