Microsoft released Office 365 to General Availability at the end of June 2011. It’s been a couple of months since that happened and I’ve just noticed two things.
First my good friend Katherine Murray has released a free eBook from Microsoft Press. You can find details of the book here. And to download the book, just click here. The book is 299 pages long and covers the full set of features contained in the shipping version of Office 365. One small omission, IMHO, is that there is no coverage of PowerShell for administering Office 365. Having said that, MS Press have indicated that updates to the book “will become available in the future” – so perhaps we’ll see more PowerShell Coverage soon. Having said that, the book looks complete and I am keen to work though the contents learning a bit more about, in particular, SharePoint! Good job Kathleen.
Following on from that, the announcement of the book encouraged me to look again at the use of PowerShell in Office 365. Frankly, I’m somewhat disappointed – the situation hasn’t really changed since I wrote about it in April. At present there is support for a set of general Office 365 cmdlets, which my good friend Jan Engil Ring has described in his blog here. As you can see from that blog post, you can download the Microsoft Online Services module from Microsoft as either 32-bit or 64-bit. There is also support for Exchange online – the code I used my April blog post still works just fine – and gives you 229 cmdlets to manage Exchange online.
Sadly, there is no PowerShell support for either SharePoint Online or Lync Online. IMHO, this is just another indication that Office 365 shipped before it' was really ready. Hopefully we’ll see these cmdlets emerge soon – but there is nothing official other than they ‘will come later’.
In summary, Office 365 is maturing, with some good documentation and some limited PowerShell support. With a bit of luck, the additional PowerShell cmdlets and support will come sooner rather than later – I’ll be sure to blog when I find it!!
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