The April meeting of the Office 365 International User Group is scheduled for Tuesday April 23rd at 1pm Mountain time/7pm GMT/UTC. This is a milestone event, as this will be on the 1 year anniversary of the first IUG meeting! I will look to have some special for this meeting! See below for a link to the ICS file to add this to your calendar!
I am switching it up and taking more advantage of SkyDrive. You will notice the link above is now shared via my SkyDrive! This will save me several steps of publishing the blog, why didn’t I do this sooner?
The SkyDrive team has announced that users can now edit documents shared via SkyDrive without the need for a Microsoft Account. This will make it easier for people using SkyDrive and sharing documents much easier as they do not need to worry about whether the person they are sharing has a Microsoft Account. Also as part of this announcement the SkyDrive Team states there are now a billion Office Documents on SkyDrive!
Read the full announcement here, http://blogs.windows.com/skydrive/b/skydrive/archive/2013/02/08/a-billion-office-documents-on-skydrive-now-with-easier-collaboration.aspx
A fellow Office 365 MVP, Loryan Strant @TheCloudMouth, has created a very cool application that can be used to create and manage SkyDrive Consumer accounts based on Active Directory accounts and email addresses. XStran, Loryan’s company, developed this tool to allow Educational Institutions to move user Home Drives away from on-premises servers and place the content in the Cloud with SkyDrive. This is a great idea, it allows a school or university to free up on-premises resources and management of a server infrastructure devoted to just storing user docs, pictures, songs, video, etc. With this application the school can create new SkyDrive accounts based on Active Directory and allow the users the benefit of the cloud for storage, synchronization and sharing of files.
I strongly encourage you to take a look at this application. Great way to provide data storage to students without the cost of servers and storage, http://www.xstran.com/solutions/dirsync-for-skydrive/.
I am now officially a Microsoft Certified I.T. Professional (MCITP) for Office 365, Administrator! I took the two Office 365 Beta Exams, Administering and Deploying, back in January. These exams are now available to everyone, http://borntolearn.mslearn.net/btl/b/weblog/archive/2012/04/04/microsoft-office-365-exams-are-here.aspx
SkyDrive has been updated! A new desktop app is included with this update that makes sharing files with your SkyDrive very easy. But one change is not so good; the default free account has dropped from 25GB of space to 7GB of space. Fear not loyal SkyDrive Users, Microsoft is allowing you to take a free upgrade to the 25GB level, but hurry, not sure how long this will last: http://windows.microsoft.com/en-us/skydrive/loyalty
So Great news on the Office 365 front today from Microsoft! The added 22 additional markets tonight. Also the Microsoft is reporting greater integration with the MAC OS with the release Lync for MAC! Along with the great updates to Office 365, Microsoft also announced improvements to Skydrive! probably the biggest improvement to Skydrive is the inclusion of HTML5 functionality.
Read all about both services upgrades here: http://www.microsoft.com/Presspass/press/2011/nov11/11-29ServicesUpgradePR.mspx
