25GB Mailboxes Available for Exchange Online

Microsoft is in the process of making available 25GB mailboxes to all customers running the hosted flavor of Exchange. According to Paul Englis, a technical product manager for Microsoft Online Services, the Microsoft Online Services Service Update for March 2010 is currently being rolled out into production data centers. The software giant expects the deployment of the refresh to be wrapped up in the next few weeks, at which point all Exchange Online customers will be able to allow users to run mailboxes of up to 25GB.

“All users with a Business Productivity Online Suite or Exchange Online Standard User Subscription License (USL) will now be allocated 25 GB of mailbox storage, a significant increase from the previously allotted 5 GB of mailbox storage. This expansion means that a BPOS customer with 10 users (Standard USLs) will now have 250 GB of total storage (10 users x 25 GB) instead of 50 GB (10 users x 5 GB),” Englis said.

It is important to note that the service update will only bump the mailbox allocation size to 25GB. Fact is that admins will have to change the mailbox sizes themselves. Englis underlined that, unless administrators modified existing user mailbox sizes to 25GB, they would remain limited to their currently allocated storage space.

“Exchange Online Deskless Worker USL storage allocation will remain at 500 MB,” Englis added. “Because the new default allocation for a user is also the maximum amount of storage allowed for an Exchange Online mailbox, the Exchange Online Extra Storage SKU will no longer be available for purchase. Customers who have purchased the Exchange Online Extra Storage SKU will no longer be billed for extra storage.”

Englis noted that the SharePoint site collection maximum had also been increased. Following the deployment of Microsoft Online Services Service Update for March 2010, the limit for site collections in SharePoint Online has been bumped to 100 from just 20. On top of this, service request now supports the addition of files, in a move designed to simplify troubleshooting for technical support engineers. Customers will be able to add 5MB of individual file attachments, and up to a total of 20MB of attachments per service request.

Due to the introduction of “a new domain management experience […] now a customer can provide their eNom domain hosting credentials in the new Domain Configuration Wizard in the Microsoft Online Administration Center, and the domain will automatically be configured to work with Microsoft Online Services. Or customers can choose to bypass the Wizard and configure their domain manually, depending on personal preference,” Englis stated. “At the end of the Wizard configuration process, customers will receive a report of the domain records that existed prior to domain configuration, along with the additional domain records after domain configuration. Microsoft Online Services is planning to add domain auto-configuration for other domain registrars in future releases.”

Additional enhancements delivered with the latest service update include support for Mac OS X Snow Leopard and improvements to Live Meeting Usage Report. Essentially, users will now be able to leverage the Mac Sign-In application on top of Mac OS X Snow Leopard. Admins will be able to better distinguish between delete and active users in Usage Reports because removed users will have “_Deleted” appended.

“A number of improvements have been made to the process to publish Live Meeting recordings, including: synchronized audio and content display in recordings; enhanced audio quality in WMV recordings, improved fidelity of WMV recordings; improved application sharing to accurately display application-sharing content versus appearing as black screen or torn image, publish WMV recordings including application sharing with widescreen content accurately; include slide transitions that follow application sharing accurately in WMV recordings; incorporate internal manual publishing tool functionality into standard recording publishing process,” Englis concluded.