Office 365 is Now Available!

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 MSDNto watch the videos and get started with the labs.

-Mayo