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!