by Brett

Microsoft has announced lower prices on Office 365 starting 03/16/2012.

The new pricing is below. Existing contracts are not effected until renewal or unless you add new seats. There is a post where Agile IT says you can ask for review of you pricing if you closed in the last 30 days.



First, the price for the P1 (Small Business and Professionals) plan ($6) and the price for Office Professional Pro Plus ($12) did not go down. However, the E plan prices have all been lowered. Since you can now buy an E plan for less then before, the value proposition for the P1 plan is diminished. You can lean about the difference in the P1 and E plan offerings from my article on this topic here

Let's take a closer look.

by Brett

Click here to register for this free webinar hosted by O'Reilly Press

A year in the making, Working with Office 365 by Brett Hill, focuses on the Small Business and Professionals Office 365 plan.. After a brief overview of the Office 365 services and solutions, you'll learn:

• Why this plan is such a great value
• Plan's limitations to be aware of
• Important new features to the services that have been released in the last few months

Join us for the informative dicussion on the Office 365 plans and features as well as side by side comparison of the Office 365 Small Business Plan and E plans.

by Brett

Microsoft has blogged about SharePoint Online updates that are being updated. Users worldwide have received notifications about updates coming that would cause sites to be breifly into read only mode, but there was no word about what exactly was being added that made these actions necessary.

Here's the list from  http://sharepoint.microsoft.com/blog/Pages/BlogPost.aspx?pID=1004

• SharePoint Online was initially scoped to scale to customers with fewer than 20,000 Active Directory entries (specifically user objects). This service update allows customers with up to 500,000 user objects to provision SharePoint Online
  
• Enterprise customers can now restore full site collections, in addition to sites, documents, lists, and list items.

Note: read between the lines here: This is classic Microspeak. They are pointing out, by omission, that the P1 plan will not have this feature.

• external users can now use their business email address to authenticate when invited into an Office 365 customer's site collection

Note: The email address must be associated with a Live ID. However, it does not have to be hotmail or live account. This is a very nice update

• PDF files will now open directly into Adobe Reader without requiring that it be downloaded first. The PDF remains connected and stored in your SharePoint Online document library as you view and edit the file. You can even check it out like other Office documents.

Once again, Microsoft shows they are moving to add value to the services and close feature gaps. There are more updates to come!