Office 365 was released to General Availability today with Steve Ballmer hosting the worldwide launch event in New York City. With this release, Office 365 (including SharePoint Online, Exchange Online, Lync Online and Office 2010 Professional Plus) can now be purchased directly from the Office 365 web site.

To coincide with the launch, I’m happy to announce an updated Office 365 Developer Training Course to help you get started building solutions for the cloud with Office 365.  The course includes 8 sessions, over 12 hours of video and 19 labs as both an offline training kit as well as an online training course on MSDN.

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

• Developing in the Cloud with Office 365 (Updated)
  • 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 (Updated)
  • 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 (Updated)
  • 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 (Updated)
  • 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.
• SharePoint Online Branding (New)
  • Customizing an intranet site with your company's identity and branding can help create a more effective collaboration experience. In this video, you'll learn how SharePoint Online allows users, designers and developers to customize the look and feel of a site. This can range from simple changes like setting a site logo and Theme to completely changing the user experience with custom styles and Master Pages. In this session, you'll learn how to make these customizations to brand your SharePoint Online site.
• Leveraging Excel and Access Services in SharePoint Online (Updated)
  • 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 (Updated)
  • 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 (Updated)
  • 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. Set up a local SharePoint development environment (or download and configure the Information Worker VMs).

2. Download and install the Office 365 Developer Training Kit onto your development machine.

3. Sign up for an Office 365 trial to gain access to the service.

4. Visit the Office 365 Training Course on MSDN to watch the videos and get started with the labs.

-Mayo