Since we announced Office 365 around the same time as PDC last year, I’ve been talking to a lot of other developers about the platform opportunities for building solutions for Office 365.  In those discussions, the most common question I get is “how is the SharePoint Online/Exchange Online/Lync Online platform different from the SharePoint 2010/Exchange 2010/Lync Server 2010 platform?”.

In order to answer those questions and help you build solutions for the cloud with Office 365, I’m really happy to announce the release of the Office 365 Developer Training Course on MSDN. This training course includes 7 modules with over 10 hours of video and 17 hands-on-labs to help you get started building cloud based communication and collaboration solutions for Office 365, including:

• Developing in the Cloud with Office 365
  • Office 365 provides a communication and collaboration service in the cloud that
    you can leverage to build custom solutions for SharePoint Online, Exchange
    Online and Lync Online. In this session, you’ll learn about this new cloud
    service and the breadth of solutions that can be developed using the same
    skills, tools and SDKs you use today when building on-premises solutions.
• Developing for SharePoint Online with Sandbox Solutions
  • Sandboxed Solutions are the development paradigm for SharePoint Online. In this
    session, you’ll learn about sandboxed solutions including how to develop, debug
    and deploy solutions. You’ll also learn the breadth of solutions that can be
    developed in the sandbox and strategies for developing common scenarios that are
    not enabled in the sandbox.
• Building Workflow Solutions for SharePoint Online
  • Building Workflow solutions for SharePoint Online allows you to automate
    collaboration-centric business processes and surface them to your users via
    SharePoint Online. In this session, you’ll learn the differences between
    declarative and code-based workflows, design a workflow using Visio 2010,
    implement that workflow in SharePoint Designer 2010 and customize the workflow
    using Visual Studio 2010 and custom actions.
• Developing SharePoint Online Solutions with the Client Object Model
  • The SharePoint Client Object Model provides libraries for programmatically
    accessing SharePoint Online via Silverlight and JavaScript. In this session,
    we’ll go deep into the Client Object Model and show you how to develop solutions
    using both Silverlight and JavaScript.
• Leveraging Excel and Access Services in SharePoint Online
  • Excel and Access Services provide powerful features for building SharePoint
    Online solutions. In this session, you’ll get an inside look at both Excel and
    Access services and how each can be accessed programmatically when building
    SharePoint Online solutions.
• Developing Communication Solutions for Lync Online
  • In this session, you learn how to integrate Lync features into your WPF and
    Silverlight clients much in the same way that Office and SharePoint do,
    including presence, contact lists and click-to-communicate features. You will
    also learn how to extend Lync communications to include data and features from
    your client applications much in the same way that Outlook 2010 does with the
    "IM" and "Call" features within an email.
• Developing Messaging Solutions for Exchange Online
  • In this session, you'll learn how to integrate Exchange Online mailbox data such
    as mail, calendar and task items as well as Exchange Online services such as the
    free-busy service into your applications using an easy to discover and easy to
    use managed API.

To use this training course as self-paced training, you’ll need to do the following:

1. Download and configure the 2010 Information Worker Demonstration and Evaluation Virtual Machine (RTM) to provide you a local development environment for SharePoint if you don’t already have one configured.
2. Download and install the Office 365 Developer Training Kit onto the 2010a VM.
3. Sign up for the Office 365 Beta to receive access to the service.
4. Visit the Office 365 Training Course on MSDN to watch the videos and get started with the labs and demos.

As always, I really appreciate your questions/feedback.  Please ping me via the Email Blog Author link!

-Mayo