Weekly Roundup: April 22, 2011 – Office 365 Edition

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There were several different announcements around Office 365 this past week.  Most importantly, the Office 365 public beta is wide open…

Office 365 Beta  The Office 365 team announced on their blog last week that Office 365 has moved into a full public beta.  As a developer, this is a super easy way to get a test Exchange, SharePoint, and Lync environment.  From an Exchange perspective, be sure to try out and understand the different plans (small business, enterprise, and kiosk) that offer different types of mailbox access and size.

In another post linked to from this announcement, the Office 365 team is starting a series specifically about helping “small business stand tall”.  Exchange, SharePoint, and Lync are the “killer apps” for the enterprise.  Now with Office 365, they become accessible in an instant to even a one-person operation.  This means, as an ISV, you’ll have entirely new markets for your products that integrate with these services and these new customers will have new demands on pricing and service delivery…

Office 365 Developer Training Kit  To help ISVs develop applications for Office 365, the ISV team announced the Developer Training Kit for Office 365.  Check it out…

“…The kit includes 7 sessions, over 10 hours of video, and 16 labs as both an offline training kit as well as an online training course on MSDN .

Training Units in the Office 365 Developer Kit

The Office 365 Developer Training Kit includes the following training units:

Office 365 Marketplace  To help ISVs and partners publish their applications and services we also announced an Office 365 Marketplace this week…

“You can join others whose applications are listed in the Office 365 Marketplace. It is the online destination, based on the Pinpoint platform, for customers, partners, and Microsoft field to find the applications, solutions, and services that you offer supporting Office 365…

…Who is Marketplace For?

Office 365 customers to find high-quality partners/apps for Office 365

  • Partners/solutions approved by Microsoft
  • Customers Ratings & Reviews
  • Rich search/browse capabilities

Microsoft partners to publicize their products and services to customers

  • Customer leads
  • Promotion as ‘best partners’
  • Customer site analytics

Microsoft field to locate and promote local partners and solutions

  • Localized User experience
  • Sub ownership on partner nomination and approval, ‘featured partners’…”