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We are pleased to introduce the January 2011 Service Update for BPOS-Standard, which includes new features and enhancements to improve the service experience for both administrators and users. Many of these service enhancements are the result of customer and partner feedback and will be deployed into production data centers for all regions by the end of January, 2011. The following features and capabilities are included in this Service Update: Microsoft Online Services Blackberry Administration Console Enhancements Two enhancements have been introduced to the Microsoft Online Services Blackberry Administration Console (MOSBAC). These enhancements are relevant for customers who subscribe to the Microsoft Online Services multi-tenant Hosted Blackberry service. User Search Hosted Blackberry administrators can now search for users in the Microsoft Online Services Blackberry Administration Console. The new search function is similar to the user search function in the Microsoft Online Administration Center (MOAC).

This week in BPOS news is a recurring segment on the Microsoft Online Services Team Blog that covers news from all sectors of Cloud Computing and the Microsoft Online Services business suite known as the Business Productivity Online Suite (BPOS). You can read all past This Week in BPOS News segments here. Happy New Year! We are back with not only the New Year, but two new BPOS stories. For this week in BPOS news we take a look at how the largest education institution in the world is increasing their productivity, and we view a chat with Microsoft’s CIO about how employees are testing the Cloud. 1. SUNY to get Microsoft’s Live@edu program SUNY stands for the State University of New York. SUNY universities across New York State feature the largest system of education institutions including universities, colleges and community colleges in the world. SUNY has 64 campuses that are a part of the Live@edu program and will allow more than 465,000 SUNY students to use Microsoft Online’s Live@edu productivity suite. In our first story, CNET discusses the new agreement between SUNY and Microsoft that brings more collaboration and productivity to students. Microsoft’s U.S. Education CTO, Cameron Evans, says that Live@edu will also help save SUNY colleges money. CNET reports that Monroe Community College, one of colleges in the SUNY system, will save $600,000 over five years. Students will also benefit from Microsoft Live@edu through new collaboration tools that will increase productivity campus wide. Is your school on Live@edu? Have you seen an increase in productivity? Leave your thoughts below. Related Stories: Kentucky Department of Education Chooses Microsoft’s Live@edu New York announces deal with Microsoft’s cloud 2. Microsoft CIO: We’re dog-fooding the cloud Infoworld.com features a discussion with Microsoft CIO Tony Scott, as they converse about Microsoft’s cloud and how employees are beta testing, or as we call it, dog-fooding. This article is a transcript of an intriguing conversation that covers topics ranging from what it’s like being a CIO of Microsoft, to how the internal beta testing, or dog-fooding, of the cloud is conducted at Microsoft. There is also some great information from Tony Scott about Office 365 and how Microsoft is beginning the internal dog-food process. Tony also discusses other cloud initiatives at Microsoft like Windows and SQL Azure. The entire transcript is 5 pages and provides some great insights and information into the mind of Microsoft’s CIO. I would recommend this piece from Infoworld.com to anyone interested in the cloud or interesting in learning more about Microsoft’s CIO. What questions would you ask Microsoft’s CIO? Are you testing Microsoft’s Cloud? Leave any of your thoughts and comments below. What are your thoughts about the stories we shared with you this week? Did you see a story you want to share with us? Let us know what other topics you’d like to see. You can comment on this blog post or send an email to our community mailbox . Follow us on Twitter and like our Facebook page.

Written by Steve Zaske Hello, I’m Steve Zaske, Product Planner for the SharePoint Development team.

Our latest BPOS Support video deals with issues you might experience while trying to verify your company’s domain in the Microsoft Online Service environment. This video starts by talking about adding a domain to MOS. The video then troubleshoots problems with adding and verifying your domain. This video should prove useful if you find yourself experiencing issues with your company’s domain. We hope this video was helpful. Watch and learn more about Microsoft Online Services with our other support and how to blog posts . What other videos would you like to see? We want to hear from you in the comments section below or send an email to our community mailbox . Follow us on Twitter and like our Facebook page.

In Project 2010, we’ve simplified the view creation process down to two steps. Step 1 : Update your current view to something that you want to save. In this example, I’ve inserted a few columns and applied a group to the Task Usage view. Step 2 : On the View tab, from any of the view dropdowns, click Save View.

In our latest BPOS support video we learn how to troubleshoot permissions in SharePoint Online. SharePoint Online is one of the services included in Microsoft Online Services. SharePoint Online comes with permission control that allows you to determine the level of visibility for users over your company’s SharePoint sites. Permissions can be set up per user or on a group basis. The video below walks us through an overview of SharePoint Permissions, and the following common permission based troubleshooting scenarios: Permission Inheritance Can’t Add New User User Not Receiving Alerts We hope this video was helpful. Watch and learn more about Microsoft Online Services with our other support and how to blog posts . What other videos would you like to see? We want to hear from you in the comments section below or send an email to our community mailbox . Follow us on Twitter and like our Facebook page.

Note:

Almost caught up with my list of to-dos before the end of the year, I wanted to step back and do one last blog post looking back at the 12 months of this milestone 2010 year. Looking back at the exact same period a year ago, what has changed? Well in December 2009 Jan Kalis and I were half way done with our Project 2010 Ignite worldwide tour back from Mexico and Brazil and were having a quiet restful holiday to prepare for trips to Singapore, Australia, Renton, Seattle, New Orleans… A year ago we had just released the Public beta for Office, SharePoint and Project and Project Server 2010… So what has changed 12 months later, well in a nutshell we LAUNCHED 2010 (or another way to describe it in Microsoft term: we Released to Manufacturing/RTM) ! Last May was when all the fireworks lit up the EPM sky! You might think it has been a quiet time for us since last spring; well on the contrary it has been non -top talking to customers, partners, journalists, and analysts. It’s amazing to see the excitement and interest for Project and Project Server 2010 (not to mention SharePoint 2010 and Office 2010). As recently as last month we had a very successful event in Barcelona

The Microsoft Online Services sign in application provides a single sign in point for Microsoft Online Services. This simplifies the login process by allowing users to sign in once to access Microsoft Online Services. The sign in app can also easily change a user’s login service password, automatically launch at start up and display license expiration information. In our latest BPOS support video below we learn how to troubleshoot some of the most common problems that users may experience with the sign in application. We hope this video was helpful. Watch and learn more about Microsoft Online Services with our other support and how to blog posts . What other videos would you like to see? We want to hear from you in the comments section below or send an email to our community mailbox . Follow us on Twitter and like our Facebook page.

The Object Link Provider (OLP) in Project Server 2010 enables the management of the Project-specific lists in a project site (issues, risks, deliverables, documents, and custom lists) and integration of the SharePoint lists with Project Server. The OLP