So yesterday, I got hooked up with access to the beta of the much talked about MicrosoftOnline service. I've been on the service now for less than 24 hours, so consider this to be an initial look/preview into the service, and I'm passing it on directly to you.
First of all, for those unfamiliar with MicrosoftOnline, this is one of Microsoft's solutions in the arena of Software + Services. Beginning in July, customers will be able purchase MicrosoftOnline as a subscription service. This service provides Exchange Online, SharePoint Online, and LiveMeeting in its initial release. I fully expect this solution to grow as time passes and more capabilities are brought into the services world.
My first glance at the offering was through the administration tool. I've included a partial screen shot for your viewing.
You'll notice that the screen is laid out in a very easy-to-follow format. I can see quickly that both my Exchange Online and SharePoint Online services are healthy. I also have the ability take action for various tasks for my online Exchange and SharePoint environment. Creating Exchange users, and SharePoint site collections is a snap.
From a user perspective, I had to install a small application for the sign-in utility. Signing into this application allows me to get access to OWA or to my Exchange Online account through the use an additional profile in Outlook. Since a single Outlook profile can only connect to one Exchange Server environment, the sign-in tool creates a new profile for me. OWA looks exactly like it does in every other Exchange 2007 OWA environment.
SharePoint sites look exactly like you'd expect as well. I have the ability to create document libraries, and when I use the Connect to Outlook option in my site, the document library synched directly to my Outlook without incident.
In my production Microsoft user account that I use every day, I'm enabled for LiveMeeting through OCS and our unified communications solution. As part of that solution, I have the Outlook add-in for Conferencing so that I can schedule a LiveMeeting or a Conference Call in OCS directly from Outlook. When the sign-in application created my new Outlook profile, obviously my conferencing add-in stayed attached to Outlook. The downside was that the conferencing add-in for Outlook does not look at specific Outlook profiles, so MicrosoftOnline reconfigured my settings in the add-in so that it maps to the LiveMeeting service on MicrosoftOnline. That's all well and fine as long as I'm using the online account. Later in the day, I was using my real production account and tried to access a LiveMeeting from my Outlook calendar, but couldn't get access because the user account settings were still tied to my online account. A quick reconfiguration of the user settings in the conferencing add-in fixed the problem. I'm not sure how big of an issue this really is because there will probably be few people who connect to multiple OCS environments.
But in the end, it's a very positive experience so far, and the service is very fast. It's easy to use, easy to navigate, and I think customers are going to be extremely interested. Look for me to post more as I continue to navigate the waters of MicrosoftOnline…and if you want to send me a message on the service, you can reach me at terrys@hlapartners1.microsoftonline.com.