Hi, Jon, I have a development related quesiton for you. Will there be an api or sdk for developers to customize the Office 365 experience. For example, MS excel 2007 comes with an api for developers to create spreadsheets programmatically. Will there be an api for Office 365 that will support these types of features? If yes, may I have more details about this? If you have no idea of this question, could you please direct me where or who I can ask for? Thank you in advance!

Hi Jon,

You say the Office 365 Exchange Online Beta Service Description document has just been updated. When I download the document, it says "Published March 4, 2010". Is this correct or should there be a newer version?

Ashley - the date on the link provided in his post says, "Date Published: 3/21/2011".

Still we have no release date and the beta is inaccessible!

@Derek: The Office Apps are the same Office 2010 apps that you use today. Any APIs still exist and will work with Office 365, although there might be additional steps you have to take if they sync with the online services

@Ashley: That is the latest post. It just took us a while to get this post live

Have you developed any MTBF, business continuity or disaster recovery data for Office 365 services.  Can these services be used for life critical support?  How about real time stock exchange communications?

@Marty: Thanks for the question. Office 365 offers a 99.9% uptime guarantee, although in the two areas you mention there is always the question of "what if". That is a valid point, and our main point is that on-premise systems run today by many of these organizations have a much lower availability. The issue becomes that the responsibility falls to us instead of you IT guy. The best place to read more about our security and uptime is on our service descriptions. www.microsoft.com/.../details.aspx

so according to the doc, office 365 STILL will not support a catchall address?  please say it ain't so, you guys added transport rules but not a catchall?

@curt: A catch-all mailbox receives messages sent to email addresses in a domain that do not exist. Exchange Online’s anti-spam filters use recipient filtering to reject messages sent to mailboxes that don't exist, so catch-all mailboxes are not supported. Thanks for the question.

thank you for that quick response!  i've been itching for transport rules more so i'll take what i can get.  i don't suppose you are ready to break ranks with your PR masters and let us know when 365 will be released? :)

Jon,

I am just a small business guy dying to use the Cloud.  When is 365 going to be available to small guys like me?

Mitch

I agree with Mitch, we are dying to use the Microsoft cloud offerings, but you can't sign up for the beta and you can no longer sign up for microsoft office live small business! What is going on? When is the release date for general release? Get your finger out Microsoft and sort this out!

Hopefully I can still get a response on this post but I am in a higher ed institute looking to potentially move services to Office 365.  I have a question about the features but can't seem to find an answer.  I read that Exchange Online only supports 500 recipients per day.  I know there is a 100 recipient email limit but 500 per day?!? I understand the point but as a school, we need to send email to 600+ students for campus announcements so I am wondering if this limitation can be extended for certain email accounts?  Thanks to anyone who can provide an answer.

@Jason:

You should be able to create a distribution list based off of an attribute on each account.

So for all students you would set an attribute of student on each account, then create a distribution list with an address that sends a message that points to all accounts marked as student.

This counts as one message in the daily allotment.

Here is a link to the instructions: help.outlook.com/.../dd439355.aspx

Hope that helps!

The main issue that is bothereing me about having all my data in the cloud, is the the security and proprietery data that our organization generates. I haven't found anything writen about this issue.