Updated April 8, 2011.
This information is subject to change. Subscribe to this blog to receive the latest information.

Audience

This post is intended for customers who have signed up before April 2011 for the Beta release of Microsoft Office 365 for Enterprises (Ent) or Microsoft Office 365 for professionals and small businesses (SB). This group will be referred in this document as Private Beta participants.

Summary

Microsoft is rolling out some updates to the Office 365 Private Beta between now and the end of March, 2011. Watch the Office 365 Beta community for updates. This document highlights notable changes that Private Beta participants may experience beginning March 7th, 2011. It also provides a list of customer actions required, to transition their current Office 365 Beta tenant to the updated version of the beta.

This document does not include documentation/help updates or issues, limitations, work-arounds, and known bugs. That information is in the Office 365 Beta Release Notes for enterprises and small businesses.

IMPORTANT

• Four of the items below will require your review and action.
• Please review the Office 365 Beta Release Notes for your offer.

The What's New table below summarizes the changes that private beta customers will see beginning on March 7th and concluding later this month. The Area column indicates the area of the service that has changed. The Offer column indicates whether the changes will be visible to enterprise customers, small business customers, or both sets of customers. The Customer Action column highlights changes that require customer action. The Description column provides a brief description of the change. Where available these descriptions link to additional information below the table.

What's New

Customer Actions Required

The Office 365 beta has been updated. What do you need to do?

All customers

• Update the Microsoft Online Services Connector.

Enterprise customers only

• Update links and registry entries to your SharePoint Online My Sites.
• Re-enable external user access to SharePoint Online site collections.
• Customers running directory synchronization must install the latest version of the Directory Synchronization tool.

Update the Microsoft Online Services Connector

As part of this update, you must install the new version of the Microsoft Online Services Connector, which has been renamed to Office 365 desktop setup on every user's computer. Before installing the Office 365 desktop setup, you must remove some applications and verify a registry setting as described in the steps below.

1. In Control Panel, uninstall the programs below, if they are installed.

• Microsoft Online Services Connector
• Microsoft Online Services Sign-in Assistant
• Microsoft Online Services Sign-in Assistant Add On

2. Verify or update the Lsa Registry key as described below.

1. In the Registry editor, navigate to the HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SYSTEM\CurrentControlSet\Control\Lsa\ key.
2. In the Name column, locate Security Packages.
3. If necessary, edit the entry in the Data column to place Kerberos at the beginning of the list.

3. Run the Office 365 desktop setup, which replaces the Microsoft Online Services Connector.

1. In the Office 365 portal, in the right pane under Resources, click Downloads.
2. Under Set up and configure your Office desktop apps, click Set up.

Update links and registry entries to your SharePoint Online My Sites

As part of this update, company My Sites will have new customer specific URLs, which will be different from the rest of your SharePoint Online sites. This change provides an added layer of security to your SharePoint Online sites. The new URL will be similar to https://YourCompanyName-my.sharepoint.com/my.

When this change is implemented:

• All documents and document libraries hosted on My Content sites will be available at the new location.
• In-progress workflows, social tags, and note boards on My Sites will need to be edited or re-created because of the new URL.
• Office programs such as Word and Excel allow documents to be saved directly to SharePoint Online. To update your Office installations to point to the new My Site location, you must update the following Windows Registry setting on every user's computer using Regedit.exe or Group Policy.
  "HKEY_CURRENT_USER\Software\Policies\Microsoft\Office\14.0\common\Portal\Link Providers\MySiteHost"
  Change the value of "URL" to https://YourCompanyName-my.sharepoint.com
  Important: Do not include a trailing '/' character.

Re-enable external user access to Site Collections

If you granted access to your SharePoint Online site collections to users from outside of your organization, you must re-enable this feature so those users can continue to have access to your site collections. To enable external access, from the SharePoint Online Administration Center, click Manage Site Collections, and then click Manage Share By Email.

Customers running directory synchronization must install the latest version of the Directory Synchronization tool

Customers running the Microsoft Online Services Directory Synchronization Tool must uninstall it and install the latest version. Installing the new version will trigger a full synchronization of your Active Directory to Office 365 Beta, but should not disrupt your usage of the services. See Active Directory synchronization: Roadmap for information about installing the Directory Synchronization tool.

Additional Information

The information below is linked from the What's New table. 

Web video is not supported

This includes adding web videos to webpages and inserting web video into blog posts. If you have already added web video to a page, a link to the video will remain, but the video will no longer play inline in SharePoint Online.

The ability to embed web video in public-facing sites via the Site Designer tool in SharePoint Online will remain. In addition, customers can utilize the Silverlight Media Web Part to add WMV videos stored in SharePoint Online to play inline on SharePoint Online pages.

Increased geographic availability of hosted voicemail (Enterprise and Small Business)

• Integration with on-premises PBXs available from all datacenters
• Integration with Lync 2010 on-premises is from North American datacenters only

New Setup Overview and custom plan sections (Enterprise and Small Business)

• New Setup Overview page that covers everything (desktop setup, Lync, SharePoint, DirSync, SSO) and not only Exchange/Email as it did before.
• Custom Plan wizard. Previously, there were only two plans: IMAP migration and Exchange migration. With these updates, the wizard generates custom plans that include other types of migration and the other services.

New commerce features enabled (Enterprise only)

• Manage subscriptions
• Catalog
• License compliance

These offers will not require promo codes.

Support for Exchange Online Unified Messaging for North America customers (Enterprise only)

North American customers in the Office 365 Private Beta can now use Exchange Online Unified Messaging.

Previously, we had restricted the usage to those North American customers who had PBXs or IP PBXs that were supported (there is a list and links to configuration details at the UM Telephony Advisor pages), but could not accommodate customers running Lync Server 2010 for Enterprise Voice. Now, with help from the Lync Online team, we are able to offer UM Online service to North American customers running Lync. Expansion of the UM Online service to other regions will be announced in due course.