by Brett

FISMA Added to Office 365 Security Certifications

Microsoft Office 365 continues to improve it's marketability by stacking up an impressive collection of security and compliance certifications. With FISMA (Federal Information Security Managment Act) federal agenices, there is an easier path to adoption of the services by federal agenices. For details see http://blogs.office.com/b/microsoft_office_365_blog/archive/2012/05/03/fisma-security-certification-office-365.aspx

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

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!

by Brett

Denver's Cloudfest is coming up! It looks to be packed with solid information from industry experts and a great way to get close the Rockies in ski season. I'll be presenting on deploying Office 365 for small business. If your coming, drop me a line and we can chat.

OFF 101 - Deploying Office 365 for the Small Business

Brett Hill, MVP - Invited Speaker
In this session, Brett will demonstrate how to deploy Office 365 in a small business environment. This session includes difficult to find information about the differences between the small business plan and the enterprise plans as well as demonstrations of domain validation, desktop deployment and mail migration options. Packed with demonstrations and practical advice, by the end of this session, you'll have a solid understanding of how to quickly get setup with Office 365.

by Brett

Great way to start the new year. Microsoft awarded me MVP for Office 365 for 2012.  Planning on Office365training.com launch this month and the book to be published in Feb or March. Nice Q1!