Thursday 23 June 2011

Office 365 Beta – Go Live Time Here

We signed up for the Office 365 Beta a while back but never heard back from the program until very recently.

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Well, after receiving the sign-up e-mail we went about creating a new domain and a new LiveID for this project. We have seen situations where existing LiveIDs used for multiple services can get mixed up or have that LiveID’s connection to other than Office 365 services broken.

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So, we are in!

We are going to add our new domain:

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We need to wait until the newly registered domain and DNS setup hits the Internet before we can go any further. Once we do have everything lined up we will publish the e-mail address(es) here to make sure we get _lots_ of traffic! :)

Creating a user:

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We will utilize the E3 plan to gain access to all of the O365 features that we can.

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And, now that our domain has come online:

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And, here we are about an hour later this is our new domain e-mail found in my Inbox:

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The reply back to the mailbox has not arrived yet, but that may because ExchangeDefender has not picked up the new MX record for the domain.

One blip so far:

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When we head into the Domain properties page we see:

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Okay, we jumped into the help resources and ended up here:

So far, nothing seems to be coming up for SharePoint:

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We went in and created a service ticket at 1400Hrs:

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The setup was brought online around 1320 Hours. 40 minutes should be more than enough time for the service to be provisioned.

1411 Hours: Still no ticket:

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Well, that’s about all the time we have for this today folks! :|

We may need to go in after the fact and set up a domain for SharePoint as mentioned earlier. But, we should get the out of the box SharePoint site once provisioned. That has not happened as of yet.

For now our hands are tied.

OWN 1 –  O365 0

At least with OWN support we get a response when we open a support ticket after a short period of time. Chalk one up for OWN.

UPDATE 14:28 Hours: The SharePoint site just came up. Go figure.

Philip Elder
MPECS Inc.
Microsoft Small Business Specialists
Co-Author: SBS 2008 Blueprint Book

*Our original iMac was stolen (previous blog post). We now have a new MacBook Pro courtesy of Vlad Mazek, owner of OWN.

Windows Live Writer

2 comments:

Andy _Parkes said...

Not great is it?

I had the same experience but it took over 12 hours to come online

I opened a ticket as did you which I also never got a reply to

Philip Elder Cluster MVP said...

Andy,

Thanks for the feedback.

No, it is not a great experience out of the box. :(

Hopefully the rest of the setup works as expected. We will be setting our O365 address on the blog momentarily to see how the system handles spam. :D

Philip