Office 365 and Exchange
Published Oct 19 2010 03:00 PM 3,162 Views

You may have seen some of the press coverage today on Office 365, which brings all of Microsoft's business productivity software together into one cloud service. Exchange Server 2010 Service Pack 1 (SP1) will be the engine that powers Exchange Online in Office 365, lighting up slick new features such as:

  • Voice mail with Unified Messaging: Integrate your on-premises PBX with hosted voicemail provided by Exchange Online, to replace your on-premises voicemail system.
  • Rich cross-premises coexistence (hybrid or split domain scenario): Drop an Exchange 2010 SP1 CAS/Hub Transport server into your Exchange 2003/2007 environment to enable advanced coexistence with Exchange Online, including the following capabilities:
    • Cross-premises management: Use the Exchange Management Console to manage mailboxes for both your hosted and on-premises Exchange deployments.
    • Calendar sharing: Enable free/busy sharing between hosted and on-premises users using the calendar federation capabilities of Exchange 2010.
    • Smooth migration: Move users to Exchange Online in just a few clicks using the Exchange Management Console or PowerShell. And, if the need arises, move them back on-premises just as easily.
    • No OST resync: The same Mailbox Replication Service used in on-premises mailbox moves also powers migrations to Exchange Online. It performs a mailbox move, not a mailbox copy, so mailbox GUIDs are preserved and Outlook doesn't waste network bandwidth by rebuilding users' OST files.
  • Advanced mail routing options: Route outbound e-mail through your on-premises infrastructure or other hosted services. This lets you integrate data loss prevention (DLP) appliances, perform custom post-processing of outbound e-mail, and deliver e-mail to business partners via private networks.

The service will also have all of the newest Exchange 2010 features that you'd expect, including good stuff for end users (MailTips, Conversation View, instant messaging in OWA, Personal Archive...) and administrators (Remote PowerShell, RBAC, retention policies, auditing reports, multi-mailbox search...).

Live@edu customers have been enjoying Exchange 2010 as a cloud service since October 2007 via the Outlook Live offering, and have been providing important feedback to the Exchange team all along the way. We look forward to providing these new capabilities to the rest of you when Office 365 launches.

For more information on the Office 365 beta, go to www.office365.com. And check out the blog post by Julia White, Senior Director of Exchange Product Management, for links to Exchange Online case studies.

Jon Orton
Senior Technical Product Manager

12 Comments
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Awesome! It's a great price for Exchange + Lync alone! Adding SharePoint, Office Web Apps and Office desktop suite to the mix at $6/user per month... WOW!

Kudos - this is further proof Microsoft has quickly made taken leaps in the cloud and is more than capable of giving competition a run for their money.

Will try the beta - keep it up!!

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Ooops the link is currently resulting in ASP error page. Hope this is fixed quickly
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Looks like a great offering, but come on guys if you're telling the world about your great new cloud service, at least make the web site work!

Tragic :(
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I think the URL they meant to post was http://office365.microsoft.com.  The one in the article points to some parked domain page.
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Sorry for the confusion folks - but www.office365.com does direct to office365.microsoft.com and I'm able to reach the default home page (http://office365.microsoft.com/en-US/online-services.aspx.
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@Bharet: But why does the "Blog" menu option at office365.microsoft.com point to a community.office365.com URL then ?
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sounds good, but there is more work with this
or not? =(
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Are there details about what CALs will be required in addition to the subscription service?

We were told with the current version of BPOS, we will still be required to own the CALs for Exchange and OCS in addition to the monthly fee.
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Around the licensing question:

For users of either the Office 365 online service or the current BPOS service, there is no CAL requirement. Customers only have to pay the monthly fee in the form of USL (User Subscription License).
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"Integrate your on-premises PBX with hosted voicemail provided by Exchange Online, to replace your on-premises voicemail system."

What I tease... I can't wait to hear more!

J/S
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Great feature, linking on-premise Exchange to the cloud service. However are the gateway services and the benefits mentioned (mailbox move, etc) available for the BPOS "standard" equivalent or only the "dedicated" version of the service?

Also, given the GUIDs are preserved does this mean mailbox permissions are migrated?


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Any news on:
- delegated admin rights
- imap access
- rules migrations
- account synch process (instead of dir-sync)
- recurring meetings
- DL migration
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