Today Microsoft is announcing the generally availability of the new Office 365.  Learn more about this exciting announcement from the official Office 365 Blog .  Customers who sign up  today will receive the new Office 365. Existing Office 365 customers can get more information about the service upgrade at their respective center for  Small Business and Enterprise . Some enhancements, like the updated Office Web Apps, are available to existing Office 365 customers today. The service upgrade includes new features and enhancements across all of the different services and here are a few select highlights: Office 365 ProPlus – Your Office as a service Office 365 ProPlus is your full Office suite offered as a subscription service.  It is the Office 365 equivalent of the volume-licensed Office Professional Plus 2013 and includes the same full apps: Access, Excel, InfoPath, OneNote, Outlook, PowerPoint, Lync, Publisher, and Word.  Office 365 ProPlus can be installed on up to five different devices per user, unlike traditional Office which is licensed per device.  Office for Mac is also included through Office 365 ProPlus, so you can easily have Office on all of your devices. Even though Office 365 ProPlus is a cloud-based service, these Office programs aren’t running up in the cloud. Instead, you download Office 365 ProPlus from the Office 365 portal and install it on your computer, so you can use Office when you’re offline, just like previous versions. Office 365 uses Click-to-Run technology to make the download and installation of Office 365 ProPlus fast and simple. Click-to-Run uses virtualization technology to run Office 365 in a self-contained environment on your computer, which allows you to run Office 365 ProPlus side-by-side with an earlier version of Office.  For more information, see the Office 365 ProPlus system requirements . New Outlook Web App The Outlook Web App (OWA) is updated with a fresh, modern look similar to the new Office suite.  The new look simplifies the navigation and interaction to help you focus on the content and get work done faster.  The new redesign also helps bring touch and screen-size specific experiences to OWA optimized for phones and tablets! Take a look at the same inbox viewed across three different sized screens:   First, you can see the new OWA on a traditional browser. The refreshed, clean look uses accents and just-in-time information to reduce clutter. For example the blue highlights unread messages and you can see contextual options (Delete & Flag) on the selected message, but not for the other messages until you hover over them. Also, with the new reply inline feature, you can reply to a mail without opening a new window to help streamline your email responses. Second, we have the tablet optimized experience. Notice the touch-friendly buttons around the edges for common tasks such as, creating a new mail, switching to calendar and contact, searching, and refreshing your inbox. To move between conversations, just tap the mail you want to view.   Third, we have the phone optimized experience. Designed for the vertical orientation, the bottom navigation is consolidated for the smaller screen. You can still see your full inbox, quickly search, and see similar email statuses like the [Draft] label to let you know you have an unfinished message. Swipe left to right across a message to get four message management options, to mark a mail as either read/unread, file to a folder, flag, or delete. You can also bulk select mail and apply these same mail management options to multiple emails at once. SkyDrive Pro SkyDrive Pro is the new name for the MySite document library. Your default storage is increasing from 500MB per user to 7GB, or a 14x storage increase for free! Another part of that is the SkyDrive Pro folder sync feature that lets you sync your SkyDrive Pro with your computer for offline copies that automatically sync with Office 365 when you make changes. The folder sync works with team sites and their documents as well. The new SkyDrive Pro shows you all of your documents and lets you quickly see if they are shared or locked to you. You can also see the last person to update the file. To sync offline copies to your computer just click the Sync button up in the top right-hand corner below your name. Clicking on the three dots by a file brings up a preview of the file using the Office Web Apps and quick actions you might want to take such as start editing the file, sharing it with co-workers, or copying the URL to embed in an email or presentation. Lync makes meetings more personal A large part of how people communicate is non-verbal, yet for many people today most work is done over email and through voice only conversations. Lync is designed to help people communicate and now you and your colleagues can feel like you’re in the same room with the new Lync multi-party HD video conferencing. Up to 5 live video streams can be viewed at a time and if the meeting has more people with video, Lync will automatically switch to the person talking. Now whether you work in a global organization or you’re a road warrior traveling to meet with clients you can be a part of the conversation and not miss a moment. We want to hear from you. Sign in to the community and leave a comment below to let us know what you think.

The New Office is here and so is the new Garage Series for IT Pros. Join our seasoned desktop specialist hosts every Wednesday in the Microsoft Garage.  Watch weekly as they: push the limits with XStream Installs of Office from the Air, Land and Water; inform you with never-before seen demos and answer your toughest questions – including commentary from Office engineers and Mark Russinovich. Check out  this trailer for a peek at what’s in store in the series.

Thursday morning, 2/21/2013, beginning at 7 AM Pacific time, the Office 365 Community will be offline for about 15 minutes, to deploy some of the changes I mentioned in the We’re making changes to the Office 365 Community  blog post. We expect the community to be offline for about 15 minutes. If you try to access the community during that time, you’ll see a maintenance message. When we return, you’ll see our new list of blogs, forums, and wikis, and the existing forum threads and wiki posts will be moved into the new structure. We’ll need to rebuild the community search index after this reorganization. The first search results will be available about 15 minutes after the site returns. It will take several hours to fully index the community. Thanks for your patience while we improve our community. Sign in and leave a comment to let us know what you think.

Audience: Live@edu; Office 365 for education Editor’s Note: Please be sure that the contact information for your institution is up to date to be alerted to key Live@edu to Office 365 upgrade information. Sign in to the Service Management Portal (SMP)   and update the critical notification field with all updated contacts for your institution.  You may already know about the Live@edu upgrade to Office 365 for education and the new features and enhancements available to your institution. Since this upgrade builds on existing Live@edu deployments, there’s no need to move mailboxes, calendars, or contacts, and no need to re-provision accounts. Even better, you don’t have to wait to upgrade during weekends or vacations; when the upgrade starts, users can count on continued access to email, SkyDrive and Messenger/Skype throughout the upgrade process. But did you know there are new resources to help you inform and educate your users? New resources include : Upgrade End User Kit : We’ve created this kit to help you inform your users about what to expect with the upgrade, and to promote Office 365 for education at your institution. Get templates for emails, posters, quick reference cards, website content, and more. You can tailor your messages to your audience and include your school’s branding. Two Account Video : You’ll also want to share this video with your users to explain the functionality of their accounts after the upgrade—the institution account (Office 365) and a personal account to access SkyDrive and Messenger/Skype. After the upgrade, both accounts will have the same password. A user can change the password for their school account without it changing the password for their personal account. If your institution was invited to upgrade to Office 365, get prepared and start the upgrade for more control: Download the upgrade planning worksheet to more easily estimate how much time you will need for key tasks required before, during, and after the upgrade. Review additional resources on the Upgrade Center and complete the before upgrade checklist .    Sign into the Service Management Portal (SMP) and click Upgrade to start the process.         For hands-on training to understand the upgrade process, including Active Directory Federation Services (ADFS) setup, you can schedule a demo . We look forward to upgrading you so you can extend your Live@edu investment and enable your students, faculty, and staff to communicate and collaborate easier with the latest Microsoft technology.

For the last several months, we’ve been busily designing and building improvements to make it easier for all of us to use our Office 365 community. We’ll start rolling out these changes in the next few weeks. Watch this blog for news about these changes a week or so before they’re released. Here’s a list of the first changes you’ll see. Click the links below for more details. Consolidate our blogs Make it easier to use and manage our forums Match forums and wikis Consolidate our blogs We use our blogs like billboards along the highway, to drive attention to new features, events, and what’s happening with Office 365. Our blog audience is Office 365 customers, partners, and anyone interested in what’s going on with Office 365. We currently have three blogs: Office 365 Technical Blog Archived Microsoft Office 365 Blog The Grid blog The Office 365 Technical Blog is the one place in our community that you can view to find out what’s going on with Office 365. Our audience is Office 365 customers, and those who support and develop for it. We’re focusing our blog publishing work on this blog. We encourage you to subscribe to this blog to stay up-to-date with Office 365. The Archived Microsoft Office 365 Blog contains posts that were moved to the Office 365 blog. We have not published to it for a year, so we’re going to turn it off. The Grid blog is where we publish contributions from our Grid members. We’ve decided to close this blog and publish all of our Grid member posts on the Office 365 Technical blog. Make it easier to use and manage our forums The Office 365 forums are where customers post questions and where we and our customers engage in discussions. The forums are monitored by Office 365 Support, MVPs, and members of the Office 365 product teams. The Office 365 forums are currently organized into categories, with several forums in each category, for a total of 37 forums. Your feedback told us that it’s hard to decide where to post, and to know where to look for information. In response, we’re flattening our forum structure by removing categories, and we’re reducing the number of forums to 15. There will be one forum for each major service or area of interest. All existing forum posts will be moved into the new forum structure, so we won’t lose any information. The Office 365 forums are available in all the languages in which we offer forum support, and we’re constantly adding new languages. Match forums and wikis We use wikis to post information by Microsoft contributors very quickly and to publish information that will appear in the Office 365 portal. We’ve added new wikis to support some of our new services, and we’ve paired wikis with forums where possible, so it’s easy for you to find information related to specific services. This will also make it easier for the service teams to engage in discussions and manage the information they present. We want to hear from you Sign in to post a comment below and let us know what you think. Feel free to share any ideas about how we can continue to improve this community.

To sign up for this webcast please download and save the attached calendar invite below where you will find the Webcast Meeting information.  Ignite Webcasts are online sessions led by Microsoft Office 365 Product Managers, Engineers and Support staff. The Ignite webcast series addresses Office 365 technical subjects and scenarios and is beneficial to anyone who wants to increase their knowledge of the Office 365 suite. View the Ignite Site for more information about Ignite programs and webcasts. You can view past Ignite Webcast sessions and materials here and be sure to see upcoming Ignite Webcasts on the Ignite Events Page .     Our latest Office Ignite Webcast discusses Office 365 migrations. We will get an overview of migration capabilities, limitations and available tools. Some of the migrations discussed will include Cutover and Staged migrations. This is a great opportunity to ask questions and join a discussion with our Microsoft presenter. Bring your questions! Our webcast will be led by Daniel Kenyon-Smith. Daniel is an Office 365 Architect in Microsoft Consultancy Services in the UK. Daniel works with large enterprise customers to help them migrate to Office 365. You can view Daniel’s last Ignite Webcast presentation here . Remember, to sign up for this webcast please  download and save the attached calendar invite below . We are excited to see you there!    —————————————————————————————————————————————————————————— Presenter :  Daniel Kenyon-Smith, Office 365 Architect in Microsoft Consultancy Services in the UK.   Date/Time:  Thursday February 21 st , at 12:00 PM Pacific Time . (1 Hour presentation) Live Meeting Information: ……………………………………………………………………………………………………………………….. Join online meeting https://join.microsoft.com/meet/v-joshto/F00T8BQY Join by Phone  +14257063500        +18883203585          Find a local number   Conference ID: 27579341    Forgot your dial-in PIN?  |    First online meeting?      [1033])!]   Audience: Office 365 for professionals and small businesses Office 365 for enterprises

Pat Malatack (Program Manager, Microsoft Corporation) has a comprehensive series of webcasts on extending the JS Grid in Project Web App. Note:   This blog post was originally created Monday, April 19, 2010. The webcasts were missing for the past several months, but have been reinstated on the Microsoft Events site ( https://msevents.microsoft.com/ ). MSDN Webcast: Project 2010 JS Grid Extensibility: Project Web App (Part 1 of 3) (Level 400) Tuesday, April 20, 2010 1:00 P.M.-2:00 P.M. Pacific Time This is the first webcast in a three-part series on extending grid pages in Microsoft Office Project Web App. In this webcast, we focus on initializing custom grid code and interactions between the grid and the Project Web App Ribbon. In particular, we show you how to add additional functionality to the Project Center.   MSDN Webcast: Project 2010 JS Grid Extensibility: Project Web App (Part 2 of 3) (Level 400) Thursday, April 22, 2010 1:00 P.M.-2:00 P.M. Pacific Time This is the second webcast in a three-part series on extending grid pages in Microsoft Office Project Web App. In this webcast, we focus on the use of events and delegates to interact with the timesheet grid in a way that allows for the addition of custom features and functionality to that page.   MSDN Webcast: Project 2010 JS Grid Extensibility: Project Web App (Part 3 of 3) (Level 400) Tuesday, April 27, 2010 1:00 P.M.-2:00 P.M. Pacific Time This is the third webcast in a three-part series on extending grid pages in Microsoft Office Project Web App. In this webcast, we walk you through more grid customizations, including adding custom commands to the column header dropdown and custom row header states.

Lync-to-phone for Office 365 gives your business the power of a complete communications system without having to install any costly equipment. With an appropriate Office 365 service plan and a Lync-to-phone provider , you can give your users a complete unified communications experience: Make calls to, and receive calls from, any phone number, using your laptop with full support for Lync-optimized PC peripherals like speakerphones or headsets .  Includes full support for IP desk phones with Lync Phone Edition Get the calling features you need to stay in touch and stay productive wherever you go: Lync-to-phone feature Description Make calls to, and receive calls from, any phone number Extend the reach of Lync Online by connecting  to the traditional telephone network Forward calls Simultaneous ring Forward calls to another number, or have another  phone ring at the same time as your work number Transfer calls Transfer the call you’re on from your computer to your mobile phone or any other number Caller ID You can screen calls, and identify yourself to outside callers Call via your work number on your mobile device With the Lync client installed on your smart phone or tablet, you can display your work number to the person you’re calling Delegate calls to an assistant Set up an assistant to make and receive calls on your behalf Delegate calls to your team Define a group of colleagues who can pick up your incoming calls Access voice mail from Lync or Outlook With Exchange Online Unified Messaging, you can check your voice mail directly from Lync, and receive transcriptions in email. Requires Exchange Online Plan 2. Set up Unified Messaging access numbers If your business requires it, you can set up an external number that people can use to access their voice mail if they can’t get to a computer or mobile device. You can also add an auto attendant number for automated routing of incoming calls. The first qualified Lync-to-phone provider is Jajah Voice for Office 365 , with phone numbers currently available for the United States (US) and United Kingdom (UK). Additional providers are currently under evaluation but there is no immediate timeline available. IMPORTANT : Lync-to-phone is not available in organizations with a hybrid server/service deployment. Service Details Your Lync-to-phone provider connects you to the public switched telephone network (PSTN). You can Re-use your existing phone numbers Get new local numbers Purchase domestic and international calling plans IMPORTANT : Lync-to-phone service is billed separately from Office 365. You’ll receive two bills: one from Microsoft for Office 365, and one from your Lync-to-phone provider for telephone network connectivity. Lync-to-phone is available with the following Office 365 service plans Office 365 service plan Additional licenses required Midsize business and enterprise plans E1, E2, or E3 Lync Plan 3 Exchange Plan 2 Enterprise Plan E4 None Service Coverage The first qualified Lync-to-phone provider is Jajah Voice for Office 365 , with phone numbers currently available for the United States (US) and United Kingdom (UK). US and UK numbers can be assigned to users in other countries, or used by businesses located in other countries, as long as those countries have Lync Online audio service available, and can provide a US or UK billing address. Location of your business or your users Lync-to-phone numbers available US and Canada US numbers United Kingdom, Europe, the Middle East, and Africa (with some exceptions ) UK numbers Emergency services All emergency calls are routed by your Lync-to-phone provider to a national emergency dispatch center. The dispatch center first determines if the caller is at the location of record for that phone number, or at another location, and if necessary, updates the callers location. The call is then connected to the appropriate Public Safety Answering Point (in the US) or British Telecom (in the UK).  How it works Lync-to-phone for Office 365 is a cloud-based voice solution that’s fully integrated with Lync Online and Exchange Online.  This makes your job as an admin much simpler: the network connectivity and routing has already been taken care of, and the Lync-to-phone service provider delivers full data-center resiliency. Once you’ve contacted a Lync-to-phone provider and purchase new phone numbers—or arranged to have your existing phone numbers ported over—all you need to do as an admin is Get the necessary licenses and assign them to users If you’ve purchased new phone numbers, assign them to users Set up your Lync-to-phone service provider in the Lync admin center Set up an Exchange Unified Messaging dial plan and assign it to users See Administering Lync-to-phone for details. Signaling and Media Flow Signaling for call setup and control flows between the Lync client and the Lync Online infrastructure. Call media flows directly between the Lync client endpoint and the target of the call, as shown in the following figures. In calls to or from the traditional telephone network, media flows between the Lync client and the Lync-to-phone provider’s PSTN gateway. Figure: PSTN call flow In a conference call, as shown in the figure below, media flows between Lync clients, PSTN callers, and the Lync Online conferencing server. Figure: Conferencing call flow Planning for Lync-to-phone Review and complete all the Lync Online configuration tasks . Of particular importance: You’ll need to make changes to your firewall and domain name servers for Lync and Lync-to-phone to work correctly. For best audio quality, order “Optimized for Lync” audio devices like speakerphones and headsets. IMPORTANT : If you plan to re-use your existing phone numbers with Lync-to-phone, make sure you complete the configuration steps in the following section before the ported numbers are activated. Administering Lync-to-phone Use the Office 365 portal to complete all of your Lync-to-phone configuration tasks: Assign licenses and phone numbers Access the Lync Online Control Panel and Exchange Control Panel Figure: Office 365 admin home page Once you’ve set up Office 365 and purchased Lync-to-phone service, complete these tasks to get up and running: Figure: Lync-to-phone set up overview Learn more: Download: Lync-to-phone Setup Checklist Video: Configuring Lync-to-phone for Office 365 Video: Configuring Lync-to-phone with Exchange Online Unified Messaging for Office 365 Where to go for support Both Microsoft and your Lync-to-phone provider are available to support their respective services.   In general, Microsoft should be contacted first for support unless there is a problem specific to PSTN calling or the associated billing. Contact Microsoft for these types of issues: Error when assigning phone number Call features not working – transfer, forward, simultaneous ring Exchange Voice Messaging not working Exchange Auto Attendant and Outlook Voice Access not working Audio Quality issues Contact your Lync-to-phone provider first with these kinds of issues Incoming calls not completing Outgoing calls not completing Caller ID issues Call transfer to a number fails and the user is always returned to the original conversation Call forward to a number fails with a disconnect tone Gets disconnected in the middle of the call Keypad commands (DTMF signals) aren’t recognized Billing questions

Author: Jeremy_MSFT Originally published to the Office 365 Preview blog. Office 365 ProPlus Preview enables users to install Office desktop apps directly from your organization’s new Office 365 site. The process is similar to Office 365 desktop app self-installation today, except with all of the technology enhancements with Office Click-to-Run along with streamlined experiences the process becomes faster and easier to navigate for new users. The section in the series provides screen-by-screen experiences for non-Administrator users to install Office 365 ProPlus and configure personal settings. Office 365 Sign In on www.office365.com User will click “Install software and connect it to the cloud” tile User then clicks “The latest version of Office” hyperlinked text Language and architecture settings are selected and user will click “install” Internet Explorer will then prompt to run Setup and a User Account Control dialog will appear Office 365 ProPlus streams to the PC and is available for use within a few moments The main things to be aware of before streaming Office 365 ProPlus are that your system needs to meet minimum requirements , you should have administrator rights to install the software and because Office 365 ProPlus improves side-by-side support, you don’t need to uninstall or upgrade your version of Office because the new Office will run alongside the old install.

Is data your currency? Need analytics best practices and strategies you can put to work immediately? Then the  PASS Business Analytics Conference is the place to be between April 10th and 12th, 2013. You’ll return to your job armed with newfound expertise and connections required to make an immediate organizational impact.  Register now to: Access, mash-up, and analyze data from virtually any source and rapidly create compelling analytical models with PowerPivot in Excel 2013 and Office 365 Provide stunning data visualization to discover new insights with a highly interactive and familiar data exploration, visualization, and presentation experience with Power View in Excel 2013 and Office 365 Learn from top industry and Microsoft experts about real solutions and get practical guidance on capturing the value of business analytics for your business Be inspired by keynote speakers: Dr. Steven Levitt — co-author of Freakonomics; and Microsoft BI experts Kamal Hathi and Amir Netz . REGISTER NOW     Have questions?  Send mail to PASS , they have all the answers. Looking for sponsorship opportunities?  Contact Al Shuler , +1 614.532.5539