Office 365 Available to Purchase

As of this morning, existing trial users will see additional choices if they select the Purchase option from within their tenancy.

Small Business (P1) and Enterprise (E3/K2) trial customers will now have the option of purchasing their current SKU or, in the case of Enterprise customers, purchasing any of the additional SKUs

All pricing is per user per month. See below

Office 365 – Which SKU is right for you…

…. and the fail of the Small Business P1 SKU

Before I start, I want to point out that I love the Office 365 service. I’ve deployed BPOS installations on BPOS-S and BPOS-D, and I look forward to taking customers through their migrations to the Office 365 Enterprise service or taking new customers on the Cloud experience.

What I’m not impressed with is the way the Small Business (P1) SKU has been thought through.

New Lync Client Update (KB2540951) – Includes a fix for Lync Online

A New Lync (Communcaitor) update has been released this morning, which addresses 2 issues:-

• 2543532  (http://support.microsoft.com/kb/2543532/ ) Credential
  prompts occur when you sign in to Lync 2010 by using the Lync Online service
• 2543531  (http://support.microsoft.com/kb/2543531/ ) Lync 2010 does
  not authenticate after you resume the computer from hibernation

Download Here

Latest Build Number : 7577.275

Lync Server 2010 CU2 Released

As some of you may have noticed, when CU2 released, there was only group chat and Client updates, now the server update has been released.

Nice of Microsoft to include LyncServerUpdateInstaller.exe, which allows you to download a single file and install on all servers, without having to sit and work out what individual updates for each server.

Download them all from:

http://www.microsoft.com/downloads/en/details.aspx?FamilyID=796480cd-daf4-4463-b418-7391cc46a5e1

Lync Server 2010 Setup or Remove Lync Components fails on Windows Server 2008 R2 SP1

A good Tweeter (@_busbar) this morning pointed me in the direction on this – something to keep at the back of your mind when doing a Lync installation, or a Deployment plan on Windows 2008 R2 SP1

http://support.microsoft.com/kb/2522454

Lync Beta Exams Pass

Pleased to announce today that I’ve passed by Lync Exams 70-664 and 70-665, after taking them as beta.

First time I’ve taken a beta exam, and was a whole new experience.

Office 365 Licensing

There have been a lot of posts, news feeds and analysts making posts about Office 365 licensing and SKUs to try and simplify things, and from the ones I’ve read it’s still not overly clear.

Hopefully this will help explain things. All pricing listed is indicative and retail pricing only. The pricing may be subjective to change post General Availability (GA)

There are two main purchasing options – Small Business and Enterprise

Office Communicator 2007 R2 CU 8 Released

http://support.microsoft.com/kb/2501722

As well as containing the updated from CU7 (November 2010), this includeds a couple of interesting fixes:-

2489816 (http://support.microsoft.com/kb/2489816/ ) A user is
displayed as another user in Office Communicator 2007 R2

2489823 (http://support.microsoft.com/kb/2489823/ ) You hear a loud
noise when you call a European PSTN number by using Office Communicator 2007 R2

Office 365 Announced

Well, it’s been a while but this was worth a post.

BPOS-S will receive the Wave 14 set of server applications and will be rebranded/upgraded to Office 365 in 2011

Office 365 will include:
Exchange Online
SharePoint Online
Lync Online
CRM Online
Office Web App
Office Professional Plus

This is a massive step forward for the Online services, and the features and functionality that it will bring.

The question remains…. this is a change to the Standard service… so what will happen to the Dedicated offering (as both Exchange and SharePoint Online are Wave 14 in there already)….

Official announcement http://www.microsoft.com/presspass/presskits/office/videogallery.aspx?contentID=office365_announce
Official website http://www.office365.com
Transition Center http://www.microsoft.com/online/transition-center.aspx

Exchange Online (BPOS-S) Updates Mailbox to 25GB

It’s been a while but this is newsworthy

Microsoft Online has updated the default mailbox size to 25GB, but this only applies to BPOS-S. This is at no additional charge, so ideal for all SMEs out there looking to utilise new technology!