Friday, February 24, 2012

SharePoint Online Updates Coming Soon

There was a public announcement that people whom are working with SharePoint Online with Office 365 should know about - http://sharepoint.microsoft.com/blog/Pages/BlogPost.aspx?pID=1004
Around the corner will be releasing some new features and capabilities. These were things listed as current know issues for which we evaluated and pushed up in the queue:
  • SharePoint Online will now support up to 500,000 user objects. Previously it was 20,000.
  • Traditionally we think of the Recycle Bin as just for documents. Today we support the ability to restore sites. Now Site Collection restores will be supported as well.
  • External collaboration is as well going to be extended. Today Office 365 support the ability to invite external people with Windows Live ID but the user must have a @Live.com, @Hotmail.com and @MSN.com email address. This currently means you are limited to a domain. What will be changing is now any email address that is associated to a Windows Live ID account can be utilized to gain access to an Office 365 Partner Site Collection. This means external partners can have email sent to their primary work mailbox. Simply put, if a person has a Windows Live ID, they can get access to a partner site. Very exciting.
  • PFD Support is now better. Today Office 365 allows users to place PDFs in SharePoint Online document libraries, add metadata to them, put them through a workflow, publish them, search on them, etc. However the limitation that many customers asked for was the ability to open the PDF through the browser. This was perplexing to many SharePoint professionals because this is supported on premise. Actually by default, even SharePoint 2010 premise does not support unless there is a change made to the web app in central admin. Regardless the change has been made and PDFs can be opened in the browser.
The Office 365 SharePoint Online Service Descriptions have not been updated yet as the changes have not been rolled out just yet. They will be coming soon.

Office 365 Blackberry Support

This could be late news to some people however for Office 365 there was an announcement this month of some tighter integration with Blackberry. Here is a new press on it - http://press.rim.com/release.jsp?id=5359
The “net” people should know about is that this service is available at no additional charge to current medium-sized or enterprise subscribers of the Office 365 suite or standalone Exchange Online and works with BlackBerry smartphones on business or consumer data plans.
This will ensure users can access email, calendar and organizer data from a Blackberry phone. Plus service has web-based management console that can provision, manage, and secure. Security features such as resetting passwords, and remote lock and wipe are supported.