After going through the new Office 365 website I found this SharePoint Online page and to my surprise I stumbled across this text: Microsoft EA customers can purchase SharePoint with Yammer allowing them to get the best enterprise collaboration suite with SharePoint and the best enterprise social network with Yammer.

What, Microsoft EA customers? Does this mean that this great benefit will only be available for large organizations which have signed an Enterprise Agreement (EA) with Microsoft? To be sure I send a tweet to the Office365 team to check my assumptions. https://twitter.com/Office365/status/306900487456825345

@office365 responded: “Office 365 Enterprise customers have no fee for Yammer Enterprise”

What do you make of this? I was under the impression they are saying that every Office 365 Enterprise customer can user Yammer Enterprise for free, right?

And also this question from Nikkia Carter (responding to my tweet) results in the same answer https://twitter.com/CarterMcGServ/status/307210729319190528

So when writing my blogpost on the New Office 365 pricing I was pretty sure Yammer Enterprise is freely available to all Office 365 E(nterprise) and SharePoint Online users. But Now, a couple of weeks later this seems to be wrong!

First I found this on the Yammer website, which is pretty clear.

Then I heard someone speak about the chance of losing a big “Office365 with Yammer Enterprise” deal because of the fact that the customer didn’t have an enterprise agreement with Microsoft. So I started to do some research and I stumbled across this blog post from the Yammer team.

The first paragraph of the post is pretty clear (you need an EA!) , but at the end it’s a bit vague. I read it this way: Customers having an Office 365 E plan AND who have signed an Microsoft Enterprise Agreement (EA) get Yammer Enterprise for free, all other Office 365 E plan users have to pay $3 per user per month. That would be kinda silly right? (And if true, Microsoft is not doing a good job in communicating this).

I was also amazed by the response on the yammer blog post by someone named Jason Cox. He writes that there is “fine print” which states that a company would need to buy at least 250 E plan licenses as ‘the minimum qualifying entry level to get Yammer Enterprise for free’.

Finally I heard a rumor this week that Yammer is waiting until it reaches 100 million users before it will supply Yammer Enterprise to all Office 365 E plan users.  Hmm..

Since there are a lot of Microsoft partners and customers who are considering selling or buying Yammer Enterprise together with Office 365, it will be a good thing if Microsoft would be more clear about what these conditions are would stop sending out these conflicting messages…

As soon as I get new information I will post it here.

Update:
I got a confirmation from the Yammer/Office Division communications team:
“For Enterprise Agreement customers, Yammer Enterprise ships with Office 365 E1-E4 plans.  Otherwise Yammer Enterprise is available at $3/user/month and Yammer Basic is free for customers”

I guess most of us missed the details about the prerequisite of an Enterprise Agreement, because we were too excited about the news of getting this cool service for free…
I still hope it won’t take long before this requirement will be droppend..

This is the new pricing for SharePoint Online:

• SharePoint Online Plan 1 Was €3,30 ($4), and is lowered by 24% to € 2,50 ($3)
• SharePoint Online Plan 2 was  €6,50 ($8) and is lowered by 12% to €5,70 ($7)

Look at overall features per SharePoint Online plan here

• For 12 Dollar (€12,90) per user per month you get  Office ProPlus. This is the new Office 2013 desktop and mobile app Subscription for 5 devices (and a small SharePoint Plan I think).
• For 15 Dollar (€12,30) per user per month you get a new subscription call ‘Office 365 Midsize Business’ focused on companies between 10 an 250 users. You get the Office ProPlus desktop apps for 5 devices, Exchange Plan 1, SharePoint Plan 1, Lync en Office Web Apps).I don’t understand why someone would like to pay  50 cents per user/per month extra (€12,80) to get a ‘Small Business Premium’ subscription (which has less features). But there’s probably a reason for it…

• For 20 Dollar (€19) per user per month you get an E3 user. You get the full Office ProPlus desktop apps for 5 devices, Exchange Plan 2, SharePoint Plan 2, Lync en Office Web Apps. SharePoint Plan 2 will give you most of the SharePoint Enterprise 2013 functionalities like eDiscovery, Business Connectivity
• For 22 Dollar (€20,90) per user per month you get an E4 user. You get the full Office ProPlus desktop apps for 5 devices, Exchange Plan 2, SharePoint Plan 2, Lync en Office Web Apps.
  This plan will also give you enterprise Voice capabilities to replace or enhance a PBX with Lync Server on-premises.
• The new Project Pro for Office 365 gives you Project the desktop application for 25 dollar (€ 20,40) per month (and the option to easy install and stream the application to 5 devices). For 34 dollar  (€ 26,90) per month you also get the desktop app and Project Server as a Service (named Project Online). The new project Online integrates beautifully with SharePoint Online, I tested the product and I think Microsoft not only created a great desktop application (I didn’t like the former versions) but also build an Online service which has great potential.

 Yammer
About eight months ago Microsoft acquired Yammer. From today you get a free Yammer Enterprise user account with each Office 365 Enterprise User. When I first looked at this pages. it looked like you would need an Enterprise Agreement (EA) to Yammer for free with an Office 365 Enterprise Subscription. I asked the Office 365 team and got a message that all Office 365 Enterprise users can use Yammer Enterprise for free, without the need for an EA (That’s great). According to this Yammer page you will also get a Yammer Enterprise User when buying a SharePoint Online Plan.

Yammer is simply said ‘Facebook for the Enterprise’ and it’s a great product. I started using it 3 years ago and the product really matured to a great platform. My favorite features is the ability to create external networks and the possibility to add an embedded feed to every web URL (like a SharePoint List item;) using the Enterprise Graph.

Kiosk Workers
Another update I really like is the new pricing and features of the Office 365 K2 Subscription (Kiosk Workers), which became much cheaper at $4 (€3,30). You now get a 1 GB mailbox, Access to SharePoint Online and some basic editing on Office documents using Office Web Apps. Last but not least K2 users can now user there Smartphone and tablets to connect to Exchange Online using ActiveSync. That’s much value for 48 dollars a year…

Some other new details I found today:

• Small Business customers will be able to upgrade to the Midsize Business plan later this year.
• Office for Mac is available as part of Small Business Premium, Midsize Business, E3/E4, and ProPlus.
• If you currently have Office 365 you will get an email notification before you get upgraded. Once you’re upgraded, you’ll see a distinct blue top page banner in SharePoint Online, which allows you to initializes your SharePoint Online Site Collection. More information on this topic is available at the Service Upgrade center.

Bottom Line. The pricing of the new Office 365 brings great value for money!

This new release brings SharePoint 2013 (v15) to the cloud. We were able to play with the new SharePoint Online (SPO) since June last year and now we can finally enjoy this final bits running on the Office365 production infrastructure. Since this is the first SharePoint version that was ‘build for the cloud’ there are some big improvements. One of the best things is the amount of features. When you create a new Office 365 SharePoint Tenant today, you will get more than 90% of all SharePoint Standard features (using a SharePoint Online Plan 1) and around 80% of all Enterprise features (on SharePoint Online Plan 2) when compared with a version installed on premises.

Besides having more features there is another big advantage with the new SharePoint online… It’s much faster! All SharePoint Online pages load much quicker compared to the former version (based on SP2010). This is because the SP2013 pages have much better HTML (cleaner and leaner) but mainly because the cloud architecture is more mature. I have heard that some big improvements have been made on the backend (Azure database and service) architecture.  Another important thing is that the whole platform is now using Windows Azure Active Directory (WAAD) which is Microsoft’s User Directory in the cloud. WAAD manages all Microsoft Accounts (formally known as LiveID’s) and Office 365 accounts.

So what are the best new features in SharePoint Online? I could name all the good things SharePoint 2013 has to offer, but there is enough content about that on the web. Here’s are the things I like the most about SharePoint Online (v15):

• New features are added with in a simple click. Stuff that could take days to configure on premises (like Exchange mailbox integration or Visio services) provisions automatically.
• Inviting external users to your SharePoint site has improved. You can now share a site or an individual documents by inviting external users to sign in using a Microsoft account or a Office 365 user ID.  External users can be attached to every SharePoint Security group, so they can also be Site Owners! There is a nice new page to manage your external users.
• Another cool feature is that you can send people a “guest link” by mail, which will allows them to view (and edit) individual documents on your site anonymously.
• You can Sync document libraries to your computer using SkyDrive Pro, which brings a great (better integrated) alternative to services like Dropbox and Box.
• SharePoint Online Administrators can now use Windows PowerShell to manage their subscription. Read this article to read what you can do.
• I can’t make this list without mentioning the Apps and the Appstore. It might take another 9 to 12 months before this Appstore will really bloom, but I’m very sure this will be a great resource with useful and powerful features and solutions.

Here is a overview about what’s new in SharePoint Online written by Microsoft.
If you are already using Office 365 you might have to wait for some months. The service upgrade to the new Office 365 will be rolled out over the course of 2013, and will happen completely automated. The Office 365 team will let you know you are going to be migrated by sending an email two to three weeks in advance. During the upgrade, email, instant messaging and sites will keep working, and you don’t need to reconfigure computers and mobile devices after the upgrade. And if now isn’t a good time for you, you can postpone the service upgrade for a minimum of two months.

There’s also more news about Microsoft Office Mobile Apps:

• The SharePoint Newsfeed app for Windows Phone 7.7 and 8 was launched today
• The SharePoint Newsfeed app for iOS was released today
• The SharePoint Newsfeed app for Windows 8 (modern app) will be coming soon.
• The SkyDrive Pro app will be available as a Windows 8 App and as iOS app before ‘in the first half of the Calendar Year’.

When BPOS and Office 365 V1 were released, there were people who were comparing this platform to Google Apps. With this release this doesn’t make any sense, Office 365 v2 is on a different level. The amount of integration between Office 365 ProPlus desktop and mobile apps can’t be compared with the limited functionalities of Google Apps for Business. Yes, of course there will be people who favor Gmail over Outlook (Web Access), but there aren’t that much benefits left. The amount of enterprise features available in Exchange, Lync and SharePoint Online is amazing and the ease of integration with existing enterprise infrastructures (by building Hybrid solutions) can’t be archived by any other player in the market. The new Office 365 is simply a totally different ballgame. This will be a very interesting year for SharePoint Online…

The session abstract:

SharePoint doesn’t stop when one hops on a plane, or hunkers down in a coffee shop. In this session we’ll cover all the new SharePoint mobile investments including all the new mobile apps for Windows Phone, Windows 8 and iOS (including iPad). You’ll learn how SharePoint makes it easy for users to remain in the social fabric of ongoing discussions, keep up with people they follow and continue to manage their documents on the go.

When you literally read the session abstract it could be read as of Microsoft will release new SharePoint apps for Mobile [Windows Phone 8 and iPhone] and Tablets [Windows 8 and iPad]. Hmm, that would be interesting!

If this is true, what would be the purpose of these apps?
The most logical explanation I can think of is that Microsoft will release a new ‘extend version’ of the current SkyDrive Application [which is already available on Windows Phone, iPhone, iPad and Windows 8]. It could be a “SkyDrive Pro” mobile application which provides deeper integration with the specific functionalities which come with SkyDrive Pro [Online or On premises]. Features like the ability to edit metadata or connect to SharePoint 2013 Site Feeds would be great. If SkyDrive Pro will be launched as a mobile application this would become an even more attractive replacement of Dropbox [and similar apps] for businesses.

I can also imagine these new apps could be more. ..

Wouldn’t it be great if Microsoft was creating new ‘Office Hub’ apps [like known on Windows Phone 7] which can connect to  multiple SharePoint Sites and Office 365 Subscriptions?

For Windows 8 my first question would be: Will developers somehow be able to connect to these [sandboxed] applications? One of the frustrations we had while developing applications for Windows Phone 7, was the inability to leverage the Office Hub, so we are always hoping new options will be made available by Microsoft… 

We really hope Microsoft still has some nice surprises when Windows Phone 8 and SharePoint 2013 launches.

Does anybody else has ideas what these ‘new SharePoint Mobile Apps” could be?

In other words, dealing with the stream of constant mails is like losing an entire night’s sleep, in terms of ability to focus. The bottom line is more dramatic: annual loss of productivity per employee are US$ 1250 because of spam, US$ 1800 due to unnecessary emails, and between US$ 2100 and $4100 because of “poorly written communications.” See this infographic for the complete story on productivity loss at work.

meetroo online provides easy to use service, which can be used per user, per month.

Meetroo online sites are focused on Small medium business [SMB] and at departments of large organisations.
Check it out:

meetroo events is a Windows Phone app designed to make life on an event or conference as easy as possible. It basically acts like a digital guidebook which brings you the most important information about the event. You can see the session list with added information about the speakers, check out the latest tweets regarding the event and set alarms if you need a reminder about a session.
All data gets synced in real-time from a SharePoint site, so last minutes changes will be available to the event attendees.

The data for the app itself is very easy to create since it is based upon SharePoint lists. When designing the app we wanted to make sure that everyone who can work with SharePoint can create and easily manage their event data without having the need for a new tool.

As icing on the cake we provide this application for free for all SharePoint Saturdays. You can email us at info@meetroo.com and you will get access to a SharePoint site where you can manage your data.

Since the launch of Office 365 people have been enthusiastic about the service. Getting high quality enterprise IT services for a low price is one of the great benefits of public cloud computing. However if you ask about Office 365 there is one thing both customers and partners mention … The somewhat complicated pricing and feature model.

When you are buying a P1 or E3 plan, things can be pretty straightforward. When getting something special however things become more complex. Microsoft tried to make a menu where everybody could find what they need but seeing the amount of trouble people have deciding what to get it’s lackluster at best. In the end when a feature comparison doesn’t fit in a normal matrix based table you just know something is wrong…

Since we love SharePoint Online and want to help everyone to make a proper choice we felt the need to create a better overview. The complex feature trade-off plans shown in a simple graphical way.

Some of the important things to notice:

• Last week (May 21th 2012) the “Partner Access Plan” was updated from 1.000 to 10.000 free Partner Access Licenses! Every Office 365 SharePoint Online customer (at the tenant level, not per subscription) has these Partner Access Licenses (PALs) that can be leveraged for external sharing.
• External (Partner) Licensed users can use InfoPath forms to submit data.
• The “Partner Access Plan” and “Partner Access Licenses” have nothing to do with the “Office 365 Partner Internal Use Rights” (IUR’s) which Microsoft Online Partners receive.
• The “SharePoint Kiosk Worker Plan” doesn’t exist anymore; you can now only buy it as the bundled “Office 365 K1 or K2” Plan (which also include the Exchange Online Kiosk Worker).
• We love the ability to edit Office files in the browser, but in some cases you have to pay a lot extra to use it, so keep that in mind.
• Office 365 E1/E2 Plan users are SharePoint Plan 1, and E3/E4 have SharePoint Plan 2.
• You will always need one SharePoint Plan 2 Account to setup Visio, Excel or Access Services.

This is a great time to experiment with External Users. Up to 10.000 users who can access your SharePoint site for free is a very cool thing! Since the last Office 365 Service Update (which was rolled out in March/April 2012), external users can associate their own business email address (ex: user@contoso.com) to the LiveID system. (This used to be limited to @Live.com, @Hotmail.com, @MSN.com, etc.)

SharePoint Online is a great service and provides a lot of value for money. We hope this blog post will help people and businesses to better understand the different plans and features and help them make the right disscion.

meetroo products can be used on SharePoint using Sandboxed applications or from smarthones and tablets. meetroo products should be lightweight and easy to use.

Here is a simplified overview of our solution architecture:

SharePoint (The center of the universe)
The foundation of a meetroo platform is your on-premise or (Microsoft) hosted SharePoint environment.  All application data is stored in SharePoint and all functionalities around SharePoint lists and libraries can be leveraged. Using your existing SharePoint environment also allows you to easily integrate existing internal or external systems.

Windows Azure (and SQL Azure)
Microsoft’s Platform as a Service (PaaS) allows the meetroo platform to provide a large range of online services. We use the Azure AppFabric ACS for Identity federation, SQL Azure as database and Azure Compute for running background processes. We will outline more details on the capabilities in future posts.

Windows Server
An end to end enterprise cloud platform doesn’t exist today, so in the coming years we need to build hybrid (on-premise and cloud connected) IT infrastructures. Windows Server 2008/2012 will keep being important components to build secure, manageable and future proof solutions.

Windows Phone Apps
Although it will take until the next version of Windows Phone to really become a powerful platform for building business applications; the current Windows Phone 7.5 already provides some very interesting capabilities. Since Windows Phone brought the first business apps using Microsoft metro design language, we love building apps for this platform.

Windows 8 Apps
We are building Windows 8 apps today and we love it! We will be one of the first companies with an app in the Windows marketplace when it launches in June 2012. We see a lot of potential for this platform and we truly believe that within 4 years this platform will run on the majority of business tablets (and touch based ultrabooks).

Apple iOS Apps
Currently iOS is the leading platform when it comes to apps for business professionals.  For this reason we can’t ignore the platform and we plan to publish an iOS version for most of our apps.

SharePoint Apps
Our current SharePoint apps are sandbox solutions which run on all versions of SharePoint 2010 and SharePoint Online. Commonly our solutions contain a Site Collection feature to deploy Web parts and files and a Site Level feature to deploy SharePoint lists. Since the data is stored in SharePoint all functionalities around SharePoint lists and libraries can be leveraged.

When the SharePoint App Market will become available with the launch of SharePoint 2013 we will be focusing on the SPapps which can be deployed in this marketplace.

After designing and building SharePoint collaboration solutions for 10 years in 2010, Maarten realized the potential of SharePoint Apps combined with the new (touch) capabilities of tablets and smartphones. Together with interaction designer Bart Slappendel and software architect Marco Wenneker he designed the foundation for the meetroo platform. By actively experimenting for 12 months with Microsoft’s new design language named ‘metro,’ they built websites, products and prototypes. Combined with the input of communication designer Joris Visser they came up with the core principles of the meetroo interactive dashboards.  What meetroo dashboards are will be described in the next blog post.

Next to Marco en Bart we have Floris working for us, who is focusing on marketing and support and Nancy who is our virtual helpdesk and test assistant.

Next to our core team we have team of highly skilled software developers.