Big news in the SharePoint world this week with the release of Office 365 (including SharePoint Online) and the ServicePack1 release for SharePoint 2010. I missed all the action earlier this week as I was out sick but I thought I’d summarize it as a simple reference list for me and I hope this is of use to you as well.
Office 365 is now publicly available in 20 languages and 40 markets around the world at http://www.office365.com. If you’re wondering what Office365 is, it includes SharePoint Online, Exchange Online, Lync Online and Office 2010 Professional Plus that you can subscribe to as a “service” hosted and operated by Microsoft.
If you want to get a good overview of Office365’s capabilities, you *MUST* watch this video. Steve Ballmer officially launched Office365 on July 28th and did a 30-minute presentation for the press. The recording of his presentation along with demos can be found here: http://www.microsoft.com/presspass/presskits/office/online/VideoGallery.aspx.
Tip: The built-in Silverlight player gave me some errors while trying to watch the recording. I then opened Windows Media Player and did a File->Open URL and pasted this link: http://cdn-smooth.ms-studiosmedia.com/news/mp4_hq/1006657_MS_OfficeDivision_Ballmer_06282011_HQ.mp4. The video then played flawlessly!
My colleague Chris Mayo has just released the Office 365 Developer Training Course and it is available for free here: http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/Office365TrainingCourse. You can also checkout the SharePoint Online developer page (http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/sharepoint/gg153540.aspx) for more articles and downloads such as whitepapers, SDKs, etc.
Of course if you develop for SharePoint 2010, most of those skills apply for SharePoint Online as well since it is built on the same platform.
Read what others are saying about Office 365 in this collection of selected top news stories -http://www.microsoft.com/presspass/presskits/office/online/topStories.aspx
Two articles that I particularly enjoyed reading were:
My session titled “Integrating Microsoft SharePoint 2010 and Microsoft Dynamics CRM Online” from TechEd North America 2011 was recorded and can be viewed on-demand at the link posted below.
Source code of all my demos in this session is available here: Source Code from my TechEd OSP309 Session.
I also found out that John Anderson from Bamboo Solution has done a great job summarizing my session in his blog here: http://community.bamboosolutions.com/blogs/sharepoint-2010/archive/2011/05/17/teched-integrating-microsoft-sharepoint-2010-and-microsoft-dynamics-crm-online-with-girish-raja.aspx.
BTW channel9 has the recordings of all sessions from TechEd North America 2011 and you can watch/download them here: http://channel9.msdn.com/Events/TechEd/NorthAmerica/2011/. Even if you didn’t attend TechEd, you can watch all the sessions including the keynote, so don’t miss out on your favorite content.
http://channel9.msdn.com/Events/TechEd/NorthAmerica/2011/OSP309
Microsoft has released a Virtual Machine (VM) for CRM 2011 for field and partner consumption. This virtual machine is for demonstration purposes and is pre-loaded with a number of high value scenario demos. It includes CRM 2011, SharePoint, Exchange, Outlook client, SQL Server, and includes xRM scenarios such as portals, facility management, employee management, vendor management scenarios. With the host of tools available within the VM, it can also be used to kick start your CRM 2011 development if you’d like to build apps for CRM 2011.
You can download the virtual machine from PartnerSource here: https://mbs.microsoft.com/partnersource/deployment/methodology/vpc/MSD_CRM2011VirtualMachine.htm
If the standard one doesn’t fit your needs, you can always build your own custom CRM 2011 VM.