Office 365 Newswire: Office 365 for the large enterprise – 4.13.2012

I think I’ve mentioned that it is baseball season. I believe I even warned you I won’t be able to stop myself from discussing it here at the Newswire news desk. Today we have Game #2 for son’s team. It’s a special Friday the 13th ball game. Our opponent is the Panthers. This coincidence (or is it) has me looking up my baseball superstitions reference guide to find out if this is a god omen nor not. I have not found an entry yet but I’m still looking.

Given that the Panthers are a black cat plus the fact that it is Friday the 13th, I don’t like it. So we’ll see how this goes. I’ll try to remember to report back. Until then, here is today’s Office 365 Newswire!

Office 365 news & editorials!

• Office 365 for the large enterprise :: Two weeks ago, I included an item that shows Office 365 doesn’t necessarily save large companies money. The funny thing about purchasing decisions is that price isn’t everything. To some, price is everything. To others, features and service are most important. And there is whole ton of people purchase based on overall value. This article is for those of you not purchasing based on price.
• Microsoft inks its biggest cloud deal yet: 7.5M students and teachers in India :: Whoa! This is a big win for the Redmondians or for anyone. In fact, it’s the biggest cloud deal-to-date. This deal provides Office 365 to over 10,000 technical colleges in India. Wow! ZDNet has a write-up here.
• Kent State Upgrades Faculty/Staff Exchange email system :: Kent State is moving to the cloud! Their first step is to move to Exchange Online. It seems few companies today really want to manage an on-premise Exchange instance.
• Fred’s top tips for Office 365 greatness! :: If you have recently purchased Office 365 (ahem India and Kent State) or are thinking of doing so… Fred has some “top tips” for you. He covers: where to start, available tools & resources, common issues, and data security. Of course, you can always check here, at the Office 365 Newswire, each Friday for even more “top tips” and resources.
• The great Office 365 turn off :: Short and sweet. Couldn’t have said it better myself.
• 3 reasons Office 365 Could ultimately fail :: After all the good news for Microsoft this week, here is some sobering news. It is one man’s tale of a friend, a small business, and one frustrating weekend migrating from Gmail to Office 365. I think he makes some good points… especially his Reason #1. Microsoft has always done well speaking to developers and techies. They are less good when communicating to business types.
• LibreOffice OnLine will be a real competitor to Microsoft Office 365 :: So says the open-source types that work on this project. I have my doubts. I also question their definition of the word “compete”. Just because you field a team that doesn’t mean you are capable of competing. See also my beloved Oakland A’s.

Office 365 tips, tricks & tools

• Five common migration mistakes-and how to avoid them :: Sometimes we are so concerned with the right-way of doing something that we don’t stop to identify the big mistakes that lie about… waiting to ambush us. Plus knowing what the big mistakes help us know what the right-way-of-doing-things is.
• Office 365 in action: Use Lync Online to communicate with customers :: Lync is underrated. Lync probably suffers from the fact it replaces Live Meeting. But Lync is as good as Live Meetings is (was) bad. If you subscribe to Office 365 but are not using Lync’s to its fullest, check this out to learn how others are using Lync to communicate with their customers.
• Office 365 certification exams have landed :: Office 365 is totally legit. Two exams are now available so go out there and pad your resume/CV.

Office 365 developer items of note

• Visual Studio 11 Beta – an initial ‘review’ :: Did you know Visual Studio 11 Beta is supported for production code? I had never seen this that I am aware. So dive in… download VS 11 and upgrade your code. If something goes wrong… call Microsoft. While you wait on the support line, you’ll have time to read this article (and others).
• Does SharePoint Online (Office 365 Cloud) support inline code blocks? SharePoint Designer code view? :: I have a very succinct, one-word, answer for you but… I… do… not… want… to… spoil… it!
• Migrating SharePoint 2010 on-premise apps to SharePoint 2010 online
• Remote authentication in SharePoint Online :: “In the future, Javascript will be a .NET language.” “We are all Javascript coders now”. These are ridiculous quotes that pop into my mind when I read about SharePoint development lately. Javascript is/is becoming a big deal in the MSFT development world. A good question that you will eventually ask yourself is… “Self, how do you programmatically authenticate with SharePoint Online using Javascript?” If your self doesn’t have an answer you can point him/her to this article.

Cutting Room Floor

• Splashtop’s new app lets developers run Metro apps on an iPad
• If Bono loves dropbox, shouldn’t you?
• Augusta National Golf Club – then and now [Infographic] :: You gotta love that a man named Bubba won at Augusta.
• Gartner predicts Windows 8 Tablets will be an utter failure :: The haters! They also said Windows Phone 7 would eclipse iPhone by now too. Like everything, take it with a grain of salt and make up your own mind.