Microsoft Online Customer Portal Offline for Service Update

Microsoft has already started rolling up an update to its Online Services, and the Microsoft Online Customer Portal was bound to be affected. In this regard, the company informed that this Friday the portal would be taken offline. The move will be temporary and is an integral aspect of the scheduled downtime associated with the introduction of the Service Update for July 2009 for Microsoft Online Services. While offline, Microsoft will deliver the planned upgrades and perform maintenance, the Redmond company informed.

“The portal will be offline on Friday, July 10 from 14:00 to 17:30 Pacific Daylight Time (21:00 to 00:30 GMT). During this downtime, organizations will not be able to set up trial accounts, buy subscriptions, or modify current subscriptions. This downtime will not affect the availability of an organization's online services, so users can continue to access them as normal,” revealed Paul Englis, a technical product manager for Microsoft Online Services.

The software giant gave customers relying on its online services a heads up for some time now on the update planned for introduction in mid-July 2009. As of earlier this week, the Redmond company started to deliver the Service Update for Microsoft Online Services to production data centers. Englis underlined that the downtime was valid for all regions where the MOCP was available: North America, EMEA, and APAC. But in this regard, customers will continue to be able to access the Microsoft Online Administration Center (MOAC) as well as rely on the Business Productivity Online Suite, neither of which will be impacted in any manner by the downtime.

“The Service Update for July 2009 will include the following features: Migration support for hosted Exchange mailboxes; An increase for SharePoint Online file uploads from 50MB to 250MB; An increase in Live Meeting attendees from 15 to 250 attendees; Microsoft Online Services trials for India; Quick Trials—with user actions required to set up a trial account reduced by 75 percent; Worldwide user provisioning,” stated Mitch Irsfeld, editor, TechNet Flash Newsletter.