Using Office 365, you also get Lync 2010, and additional you can activate Federation which means you can add external contacts (who are not part of the same domain) if they also use federated Lync.

Today, Loryan Strant tweeted the following:

Naturally, I got very curious and wanted to find out who of my Outlook contacts might be a potential contact for my Lync.

If you follow through various links, you end up at the Microsoft website where Matt Landis provides a free tool named "Who Can Federate". Installation is quite easy, simply download the ZIP file, extract its contents, and run Setup (no need to configure anything). Once you start the tool, the UI is fairly simple. It allows you to select whether you want your Outlook Contacts or Suggested Contacts (only Outlook 2010), and start the scan. Once you start it, it verifies all the domains of your contacts for potential Lync Federation capability, and lists all matches:

Finding a match does not guarantee that adding this contact to Lync 2010 will work and that you can chat (text/audio/video) with him, so to find that out you still need to add that contact to Lync (needs to be done manually, cannot be done from the WCF Tool).

The huge benefit of this tool is of course that it provides you very easily with potential Lync contacts from your existing email contacts. No need to configure a lot, just run it and get the results! Perfect!

PS: Add me at rene @ office365management.com

For a few days now, the Office 365 TechCenter is now available. Lots of good information there, but the highlight for me are clearly the (currently) 10 available virtual labs that cover preparing the move (so ADFS, and preparing for hybrid environments), Exchange Online, and SharePoint Online:

During the past few weeks, I didn't have a lot of time to test things in my SharePoint VM or on Office 365 and write about it, as my wife and I had our Chinese Wedding Dinner end of November. As we'll be going on our honeymoon tonight, there probably won't be any new articles for the rest of the year, but new content will be coming in January!

(Photo taken by Nicholas Lee)

Today, I took the Microsoft SharePoint exam "Microsoft SharePoint 2010, Configuring" (70-667), and managed to pass it within 20 minutes (50 questions) with a passing score of 950.

I'm definitely not someone with lots of SharePoint administration experience, I never managed a server on my own except for my own virtual machines, so I didn't quite know how well I'd do in this exam. As you can see, my knowledge was really enough to pass easily.

As for my preparation, I did it mostly with two things:

1. Reading MCTS Self-Paced Training Kit (Exam 70-667): Configuring Microsoft SharePoint 2010 (Training Kits) by Dan Holme and Alistair Matthews, and going through most of the practice examples (skipped a lot which I've already done before and felt proficient enough)
   
2. Practising a lot in my own SharePoint 2010 virtual machine. What I didn't know or had never done before, I did in here. As I already did the SharePoint 2007 exams (70-631 and 70-630), there was already a lot of content that I already knew as I had practised it back then. Other things (mostly the newer stuff such as service applications, for example) I had a closer look at to be more or less well prepared (didn't know how much this exam would different from the 2007 versions)

It is now possible to view documents (Word, Excel, PowerPoint, OneNote) that one received through a Office 365 account (so viewing them in Outlook Web App) directly in a browser.

For example, I received an email with an attached PowerPoint presentation:

If I now want to quickly have a look at the presentation without opening it in PowerPoint, I can simply click on Open in Browser next to the attachment to view it in the corresponding Office Web App:

A new window pops up and shows the file in OWA, here PowerPoint:

The big benefit of this is that not the whole file needs to be downloaded in order to see it, having a quick look at the file is much easier and faster.