I received an email from Microsoft last night, informing me (as a Office 365 customer) that the recently announced service update to Office 365 will be rolled out starting October 20 and continuing throughout the end of November,

Customers will barely notice the upgrade, Microsoft says that there will be two 30 minutes (max) periods during which SharePoint Online will be read-only. Before this happens, you will receive a notification some 24-48 hours beforehand.

As for additional features, please have a look at the table below:

Feature

Description

Business Connectivity Services (BCS) <WCF Connector> *Enterprise plans only

Enables connecting to external systems via web service based endpoints

External Sharing: Windows LiveID support

Allows Office 365 tenant administrators to invite external users to a site collection. They sign in with a Windows Live ID-based user name and password.

Windows Phone 7 "Mango" (official support and http:// connectivity)

Windows Phone 7.5, codenamed “Mango,” now enables both small business and enterprise Office 365 customers to access SharePoint Online lists and document libraries from their Windows Phone.

Recycle Bin: deleted site self-recovery

Self-service ability to recover sites from a site collection’s recycle bin

Browser support: Internet Explorer 9

Adds official support for the Internet Explorer 9 (IE9) browser

Browser support: Chrome

Adds official support for the Chrome browser

As previously announced, we will be able to connect to external WCF connections with BCS. Another nice thing that many have been anticipating is the possibility to invite users from all kinds of domains (such as modery.net) and not just from specific Microsoft email addresses (such as hotmail.com) to share a teamsite with them.

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