Microsoft have recently announced they will be releasing MCITP certification for Office 365. These will be in the form of two exams:

Exam 70-323: Administering Office 365 intended for IT professionals who administer Microsoft Office 365 in an environment that may include Microsoft Exchange, Microsoft Lync, and/or Microsoft SharePoint – link . Once passed you will be awarded with Microsoft Certified Technology Specialist (MCTS): Administering Office 365.

AND

Exam 70-321: Deploying Office 365 intended for consultants and IT professionals who plan and implement Office 365. This includes migrations to Office 365 (simple and hybrid deployments) – link . Once passed you will be awarded with Microsoft Certified IT Professional (MCITP): Office 365 Administrator.

Cheers

Paul

For all those out there who are looking to move some of their services to the cloud, there is an free online resource from Microsoft that will take you though the steps required in order to set up your environment for a move to the cloud:

http://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/office365/hh699847

You only need Silverlight installed and each lab is around 20 to 30 minutes in total. It also covers Exchange Online and SharePoint Online.

Used in conjunction with other online documentation answered a lot of questions that I had about setting this up.

Cheers

Paul

I am currently doing some testing around the new Office 365 suite with my own test beta account. I have just verified my test domain and was now looking to changing some of the Exchange setting in Office 365 but I could not find the way to do it using the online GUI.

After a bit of research I realised that I can connect to my Office 365 Exchange environment via PowerShell and run commands as you would with an on premise Exchange 2010 server.

I have created a script for this which will prompt you for your Office 365 credentials, simply copy the lines below and paste them in notepad and save the file as whatever you like just make sure it has a .ps1 extension at the end, I have called mine office365.ps1:

$cred = Get-Credential
$s = New-PSSession -ConfigurationName Microsoft.Exchange -ConnectionUri https://ps.outlook.com/powershell -Credential $cred -Authentication Basic -AllowRedirection
$importresults = Import-PSSession $s

NOTE: You may need to run the following command in your PowerShell in order for the Import-PSSession command to work correctly: Set-ExecutionPolicy RemoteSigned

Once the file has been created, open up a PowerShell window and run as administrator. To run the command, change directory into where you saved the file and then run it (.office365.ps1 and press enter). The script should then prompt you for your Office 365 credentials:

Put in your Office 365 username as user@domain.onmicrosoft.com and then put in your password and click on OK.

As the script runs you will get a warning message like the following that can be ignored:

WARNING: Your connection has been redirected to the following URI:
"https://pod51013psh.outlook.com/PowerShell-LiveID?PSVersion=2.0 "

If the script runs successfully then you should return to the PowerShell prompt. A good test to see if this has worked is to run the Get-Mailbox command over one of your users in the Office 365 environment to see if you can get information about their mailbox:

This will give you a limited amount of Exchange PowerShell command line functions as compared with an on premise Exchange 2010 environment but it will give you all the basics required to make advanced changes to your Office 365.

Hope this helps.

Paul

I recently registered a test domain in order to get it set up on my Office 365 account that I am currently testing. I seemed to have a lot of trouble verifying the domain by adding in the TXT record that was required for the verification. I kept getting the following error message:

I blamed this on DNS propagation and left if over the weekend. I then came back today to try and verify the domain and I got the same error. I ensured that the record was set up exactly as the instructions told me but still no dice.

The way that I got it to verify was to select the domain that was in the status of verifying and then click on “Remove Domain”. Once it was removed I simply tried adding it again and the domain was verified without any problems:

Hope this helps.

Paul

I have managed to get hold of a public beta account for the new cloud offering from Microsoft Office 365. I just wanted to know how big the content databases could get.

I came across this Microsoft Download in my RSS feeds:

http://www.microsoft.com/downloads/en/details.aspx?FamilyID=6c6ecc6c-64f5-490a-bca3-8835c9a4a2ea

This gives you all the info on Office 365 beta that you need if you want more detail, but for quick reference, here is the breakdown for SharePoint databases:

Initial Storage = 10GB + 500MB per user

Site Collection Storage = Min is 24MB – Max is up to 100GB

Total for any company = 5TB

In answer to one of the questions that I had, yes additional storage, incremented in GB, can be bought for around £2.50 which is charged at a month by month basis.

Hope this helps.

Paul