[There's a reason that Yoda is the unofficial mascot of SBS. Size indeed matters not.] You may love him, you may hate him - THE OFFICIAL BLOG OF THE SBS DIVA
Wed, Jun 29 2011 22:49 bradley

You may love him, you may hate him

You may love him, you may hate him, but the hype over Office 365 is the reality.

Vlad Mazek – Vladville Blog » Blog Archive » The End of You; The Start of YOU:
http://www.vladville.com/2011/06/the-end-of-you-the-start-of-you.html

The reality of all of this cloud stuff is that it's never as easy as they say, it's not a no brainer to go all in the cloud, you need smarts and determining what works and what doesn't.

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# You need server training for some stuff on O365

Thursday, June 30, 2011 11:26 AM by Joe Raby

All of the AD stuff (sync or SSO) is a multi-stage setup process, and is pretty complicated if you don't know what you're doing.

Also, unless your clients are doing the one-size, fits-"all" small biz rate (there only seems to be one small biz rate right), you, or they, will need to know how to properly set up DNS host records on a domain registrar.  I personally had to work around a problem with a wildcard record for the verification to even work.  It took some calls to eNom and the O365 team to get that resolved.

If your client wants that Office Pro Plus sub, or maybe Infopath forms support, they need an enterprise plan.  Enterprise plans don't have the option for Microsoft to set up your domain automagically via full redelegation either.  To get full redelegation where Microsoft manages all of your DNS records, the only plan that does that is the small biz plan that doesn't offer any add-on options.

What's interesting about this is that SBS Essentials (a small biz product) uses an A record for the subdomains for RWA, but according to Microsoft Tech, their full redelegation option (only available on, and the preferred method for, their small biz O365 service) doesn't allow for A records in the customization options.  Is that dumb, or what?  BTW: when are those add-ins coming out?  I'd like to see DNS for Office 365 handled completely automatically by the add-in for hosting partners that already support the Microsoft auto-DNS API's (eg. GoDaddy, eNom, etc.).  I really hope the add-ins support more than just the small biz plans on Office 365 too.  IMHO, the small biz plan has some notable exclusions that I feel a lot of businesses would benefit from.

Any word on when partners get their full license allotment too?  I'm still only showing 25 licenses.  I'd like to know what plan partners get too....there hasn't been any indication on the Cloud Essentials site as to what plan is being offered, and all I know is my 25 beta licenses have carried forward.

# re: You may love him, you may hate him

Thursday, June 30, 2011 1:10 PM by Dean

"we have SLAs that give money back [to customers] if we have an outage"

www.theregister.co.uk/.../microsoft_cloud_uptime