Quite a view subscribers to the Office 365 Beta have been given access to their beta tenant, as I gather by following the tweets on #Office365.

For more information on Office 365, just go to: http://www.office365.com

Given the amount of questions that are raised, I just felt like posting this blog post, with first the one link that you have to go to download all official information Office 365, and that is this one: http://www.microsoft.com/downloads/en/details.aspx?FamilyID=6c6ecc6c-64f5-490a-bca3-8835c9a4a2ea

While going through the Microsoft Exchange Online Beta Service Descriptions, a few things popped out

Limits

• Message Size Limit for Exchange Online is 25MB (including attachments), this cannot be adjusted up or down. But, by creating transport rules, it is possible as an administrator to limit the maximum size of individual attachments
• Recipient Limits:

• Each Exchange Online mailbox can send messages to a maximum of 500 recipients per day
• A distribution group stored in the GAL counts as one recipient

• Message rate limits: users can send only 30 messages per minute (if more are sent per minute by a recipient, they will be queues and delivered)

Deleted Item & Mailbox Retention Time

• Deleted Item Retention Time is set to 14 days
• Single Item Recovery is enabled by default, and set to 14 days
• Single Item Recovery can be extended, but depends on O365 USL
• Deleted Mailbox Retention Time is set to 30 days

Supported clients

• Outlook 2003 is NOT supported!

Outlook Web App

• OWA Logon Page can be customized when using ADFS v2 to provide Single Sign-On with Office 365
• Public Computer or Private Computer Options are not offered
• Change password from within OWA is possible, when NOT using ADFS v2

Shared Mailbox

• Do not need a license
• But all users accessing a shared mailbox requires a USL (Exchange Online Kiosk workers cannot access shared mailboxes!)

Something you can’t do in Exchange On Premise environment = Connected Accounts!!

• Enables users to connect external email accounts to their Exchange Online accounts, and use OWA to send and receive mail from these connected accounts
• Can be disabled by an administrator

Address Lists

• Creating of custom address lists, Global Address Lists views is not supported

Calendar Sharing through iCal is possible!

Conference Rooms

• Do not require a USL
• Mailbox quota is 250MB

Various

• Exchange Online uses the same RBAC framework as Exchange Server 2010 Service Pack1
• Exchange Online provides Administrator Audit Logging, and Mailbox Audit Logging
• Exchange Online can be used as an SMTP delivery service to relay email messages sent from fax gateways, network appliances, and custom applications
• Exchange Online provides the ability to route outbound mail through an on-premises server or a hosted service

In the Appendix, you can find a nice Exchange Online and Exchange Server 2010 Service Pack 1 Feature Comparison!

Ilse

Today I have had the privilege of doing both a BreakOut Session on Secure Remote Access in Lync, and a Demo Session on Office365, together with my colleague Koen Van Tolhuyzen, at the TechDays in Antwerp!

In this demo session, we tried to show off the wonderful world of Office365, in the limited time of 35minutes…which was actually too short, but I’m happy we have been able to show some of the nice features included, as the just-released New Time Management Application, for which you can find more information here: http://www.microsoft.com/presspass/features/2011/apr11/04-27CalendarAnalytics.mspx

As promised, here’s the PowerShell script I used to demonstrate Exchange Management Shell, against our O365 tenant. And as said, you can use this one as well against your Exchange On Premise Organization

Question/Challenge: is it possible to grant everyone Reviewer permission to everyone’s calendar in your Exchange Organization?

Answer: sure, by using a simple Shell script

Step 1. Definition of the problem

When I try to open up the calendar of one of my colleagues, by default I can only see whether he/she is busy or not, as shown in the print screen below:

Step 2. Resolve the problem

The problem is that by default, the default user has got the permission of “AvailabilityOnly” on the calendar…in order to see full details, I could change the value to Reviewer, as an example. Let’s see…

To see the permissions for the calendar, I can use the cmdlet Get-MailboxFolderPermission, so to retrieve the permission set on the calendar of the mailbox belonging to Ilse, I can enter: Get-MailboxFolderPermission ilse:\calendar.

To change the permission of the Default user to Reviewer, I can run the cmdlet Set-MailboxFolderPermission ilse:\calendar –User default –AccessRights Reviewer:

Step 3. Another Issue Pops Up

Now I would like to change the permission on the calendar of Koen, but when running the cmdlet Get-MailboxFolderPermission koen:\calendar, I end up with the following error:

Reason is that Koen doesn’t have a Calendar, but an “Agenda”:

So, in order to change the permissions on the calendar, we need to get a hold of the folder names… we can use the cmdlet Get-MailboxFolderStatistics

Step 4. Retrieve the Folder Namings

In order to retrieve the folder names for all mailboxes in your organization, we can use the following Shell line:
Get-Mailbox | Get-MailboxFolderStatistics | Where {$_.Foldertype -ilike "calendar"} | ft identity,name,folderpath

When you export this output to an excel file, you can use it as input to change the permissions for everyone to Reviewer on everyone’s calendar

Get-Mailbox | Get-MailboxFolderStatistics | Where {$_.Foldertype -ilike "calendar"} | select identity | export-csv names.csv

Step 5. Another issue pops up

In order to change the permissions, you need to define the name of the folder as “userid”:\”foldername”, but when looking at the content of the names.csv file, it only shows “userid”\”foldername”. In order to change the \ to :\, you could use notepad, and do a find replace (as I did in the demo session), but off course you could use the shell for this

Running the following line, will get the content op names.csv; and replace the \ with :\. Since \ is a reserved character in PowerShell, you will need to escape it using a \

(Get-Content names.csv) | Foreach-Object {$_ -replace '\\', ':\'} | Set-Content names.csv

Step 6. The Single Shell Line to replace the Permissions on everyone’s calendar, to grant the Default User the permission of “Reviewer”.

Running this line will open every mailbox, and set the permission of the default user to Reviewer:

Import-Csv Names.csv | % { Set-MailboxFolderPermission -Identity $_.Identity -AccessRights Reviewer -User Default}

Checking with Koen’s “Agenda” the script has run successfully

Checking with OWA, it has definitely run successfully

Mission accomplished!

Ilse