Office 365 Ignite PLUS: Office Partner Launch

If you're a Microsoft Partner and sell Office 365 the place to be next week is in Redmond.  The Office 365 Ignite Plus training and launch event will be held on the Microsoft campus with three tracks of sessions for technical and sales readiness.

If you haven't already, check out the event here.  Registration may still be open, I'm not sure.  They did say they had limited spots available.  The dates are January 22 – 24, 2013.  The event is free (unless you cancel) but you do have to get there and find somewhere to stay.

Here's the agenda:

Get Ready for the next Office 365 - Overview	Grow your business with the new Office	Understand the new Office
Office 365 for I.T. Pros	Partnering with Microsoft	The New Office
Identity and Access Management	Understand the  Microsoft Office 365 Sales Process	The New Office Web Apps
Exchange Online	Winning in a competitive services market place	Project Online
Migrating to Office 365	The Customer Immersion Experience, a selling tool	Visio
Exchange Online Protection	Understand and optimize for the Microsoft Sales Organization	Office Telemetry and application compatibility
Lync Online	Solution Selling, how Microsoft does it	Office 365 Pro Plus
Data Loss Prevention	How to run an O365 Proof of Concept	The new opportunities for developers and custom apps
Business Intelligence	Helping customers with their regulatory compliance (invite only)
SharePoint Online	How we joint sell with partners to our large customers
Yammer	The advantage of becoming a Cloud Deployment Partner
Archiving & E-Discovery	Dedicate partner investments for you

I see good information in each of the tracks and am going to have a hard time deciding which sessions to attend.  If you're going, mention #IgnitePlus or @QuiteCloudy and I'll shout out to everyone else who plans to be there.

I look forward to meeting some of you next week!

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Additional Office 365 Service Update for October

One additional Office 365 update for October was just announced (I know... its November now).  The new Office Web Apps features are going live for SharePoint Online in the next couple days.  I mention the changes in the announcement e-mail but the details weren't all there yet.  It looks like Word, Excel, PowerPoint and OneNote all get a makeover this time around.

Here is the revision notice with specifics:

New Office Web Apps features in SharePoint

With the latest SharePoint Online update, you’ll get new Office Web Apps features: more editing and formatting controls, co-authoring support across the web apps and expanded device support, including editing from tablets.

Using web-based versions of Word, PowerPoint, Excel and OneNote you can view, edit, and work together on Office documents from nearly anywhere. Here is a highlight of the new features across each Office Web App:

·         Word Web App Update: See graphics, images, and layout with excellent fidelity, including new support for viewing and adding comments. Format and design documents right from a browser with commonly used features from Word on the desktop, including new page layout tools, picture tools and word count. New co-authoring and comment support in Word Web App makes it easier to work together on the web.

·         Excel Web App updates: Get essential spreadsheet features, such as merge cells, context menus, auto-fit columns, formula assistance, fill handle and AutoSum. Manipulate and visualize data for deeper insights with support for high fidelity charts including 3D, improved Query Table and Data Validation support, Slicer functionality and Pivot Chart interactivity.

·         PowerPoint Web App updates: Presentations look like they do on the desktop, with high-resolution slides, full transitions, and viewable comments. Audio and video playback is now supported, even from a tablet or phone. Drag and drop support makes for easier layouts. While the ability to insert images, apply transitions and animations, or add a pre-designed theme make polished presentations from a browser possible. And new co-authoring and comment support in PowerPoint Web App improves collaboration in the cloud.

·         OneNote Web App updates: Users can find what they need more easily with the ability to search on a page or within a section. And new support for ink viewing makes more information accessible from the web. Just click-to-type anywhere on the page to add a note, picture or a tag. And notes can now be shared as a URL, viewable on a phone, PC or tablet through a browser.

If you would like to learn more, we recommend the following blog post by Mike Morton, Group Program Manager of the Office Web Applications, which describes the coming Office Web App enhancements.

Note: Office 365 will be ending support for Internet Explorer 7 (IE7) on October 1st, 2012. The upcoming Office Web Apps update does not support IE7. Please review the Office 365 system requirements page here.

Additional Information:
To read more on Web Apps go to this Technical Blog article.

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Office 365 P1 vs E1 Plans - What Does $2 Buy You?

This is a no-brainer.  There is NO reason to go with P1 if you only save $2 per user.  You lose so much:

1. Phone support 24x7 - this is HUGE.  The Office 365 community is great but I wouldn't want to depend on them solely for support for a system critical to the operation of my business.
2. There is NO upgrade to E1 - this one is also BIG.  In order to move up to E1 if you need it you need to do another full migration - VERY painful.  It's best to avoid this issue even if you're nowhere near the 50 user limit for P1.
3. SharePoint - the version of SharePoint you get with P1 doesn't include its full functionality.  You don't get My Sites (individual user sites).  Also, you don't get the workflow features and some other bits.
4. Storage upgrades.  If you think you'll ever need more than 25GB per mailbox for e-mail storage you need E1.  P1 doesn't have any upgrade path to E3 where you get unlimited e-mail storage.
5. E-mail archiving and legal hold - you need Exchange Plan 2 or E3 or better for these.  Legal hold doesn't sound like something most people need, but it allows you to force Office 365 to hold on to e-mail for longer periods of time.  Since your backup options are limited with Office 365 this is a way to get the benefits of archival backup solutions that let you restore data from previous points in time - a feature otherwise unavailable in Office 365.
6. Office Professional Plus - if there's the possibility that you would ever need the full version Office suite you need to be in the E plans so you can upgrade to E3.  Otherwise you'll be stuck on your old Office version until you go pay your $399 per user capital expenditure.  $6 per month (the difference between E2 and E3) looks like a pretty good deal in comparison.

The only thing you lose going from P1 to E1 is the ability to both view and EDIT documents in Office Web Apps.  If you really need to be able to edit you can move up one more notch to E2 for $14 per month instead.

$8 per month is a steal for everything you get.  You've moved a capital expentiture to a regular operational expenditure that you can budget reliably for.  Also, don't be surprised if the price continues to go down and if features are added.  These are some of the benefits of expanding market share on a cloud service... you keep on getting more and more for your money.

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