Corey Roth [MVP] : SharePoint 2010, Office 365, SharePoint Online

A TechEd Guide for SharePoint People

CoreyRoth — Tue, 05 Jun 2012 16:30:38 GMT

It’s true. I admit it. I have a sickness. I am a SharePoint person and proud of it. I’m attending Microsoft TechEd in Orlando next week (and in Amsterdam at the end of the month) for the first time. Although I am a noob to this conference, I thought I would share my thoughts on what you can do to maximize your SharePoint experience. TechEd covers all sorts of Microsoft technologies but there are plenty of SharePoint things to do.

Be sure and check out my TechEd Readiness Checklist as well.

There are over fifty sessions and hands-on-labs about SharePoint being offered. Take a look at some of these sessions:

Building Federated External Access for Microsoft SharePoint 2010 (Pre-conference Sunday 6/10 10:00a – S210A) – If you happen to be around for the pre-conference this session looks really exciting. Unfortunately, I won’t be arriving in time to see this session.
Advanced Architectures for Microsoft SharePoint 2010 (Monday 6/11 1:15p – S329) – This is a Bird of a Feather (BoF) session that goes deep talking about service applications, cross-farm services and search.
36 Terabytes: How Microsoft IT Manages SharePoint in the Enterprise (Monday 6/11 4:45p – S330A) – I always find it interesting to see how Microsoft is managing SharePoint internally.
Exploring the Power of Page Layouts in SharePoint 2010 WCM Sites (Tuesday 6/12 10:15a - S210E) – MVPs John Ross and Randy Drisgill will teach how to do great things with page layouts.
Advanced Microsoft SharePoint 2010 Upgrade Troubleshooting (Tuesday 3:15p – S210A) – MVPs Shane Young and Todd Klindt explain how to get past common upgrade issues. That and the fact that Todd gave me crap on twitter. :)
Why Microsoft SharePoint and Windows Azure are Just Plain Better Together (Wednesday 6/13 8:30a – S230A) – I’ve seen Steve Fox speak a number of times and it always entertaining.
Code vs. "No-Code": Exactly Who Gets to Call Themselves a SharePoint Developer? (Wednesday 6/13 10:15a – S319) – This is always an interest debate and this BoF is sure to provide a great discussion.
Building and Customizing My Sites with Microsoft SharePoint 2010 (Wednesday 6/13 1:30p – S220G) – Another session with Ross and Drisgill showing you how to make your My Sites look better.
Making the Most of Search in SharePoint Online (Wednesday 6/13 3:15p – S210E) – The guy that is giving this session is awesome. I of course have to plug my own personal session. :) Come see how you can make search in SharePoint Online rock.
Configuring Kerberos for Microsoft SharePoint 2010 BI in 7 Steps (SQL Server 2012) (Wednesday 6/13 5:00p – S331A) – Configuring Kerberos can always be a challenge. This session can help.
I’m a SharePoint Developer in an Enterprise World! (Thursday 6/14 8:30a – S319) – I’m a fan of all of the Birds of a Feather sessions.
Step-by-Step: Building Search Driven Applications That Matter (Thursday 6/14 2:45p – N220A) – Great session on how to build SharePoint applications built around Search.

If I didn’t list your session, no offense. I can’t cover them all. That and I wanted to actually get this post out before the end of the conference. :)

TechEd has some great opportunities for certification. If you are looking to get certified, be sure to check out the following session.

Exam Cram Session on Exams 667 and 668: Microsoft SharePoint Server 2010 (Tuesday 6/12 1:30p) – MCM Shannon Bray will be there to help you study for the exams.

There’s a whole heap of Hands-on-Labs (HoL) for SharePoint. This is a great way to work through a scenario in SharePoint while being able to raise your hand for help. Here are a few examples (see the link above for the complete list):

Of course there are a lot of other non-SharePoint things you should consider attending as well:

Opening Keynote (Monday 6/11 9:00a – N. Hall A1) – Of course you don’t want to miss the keynote
Windows Azure Today and Tomorrow (Monday 6/11 11:00a – N310) – When Scott Guthrie talks, you listen.
What’s New in Visual Studio 2012 (Monday 6/11 1:15p – N210) – If you are a developer, you need to know what’s coming in Visual Studio 2012. Be sure and check out my Visual Studio 2012 series for SharePoint as well.
PowerShell Remoting in Depth (Monday 6/11 3:00p – S320E) – We use a lot of PowerShell in SharePoint.
Tuesday Keynote (Tuesday 6/12 – 8:30a – N. Hal A1)

Hopefully this is a good list to get you started. Is there anything that I missed that should be on here? Leave a comment and I’ll get it added. Also keep an eye our for my TechEd Readiness Checklist post as well as a similar post for TechEd Europe. I look forward to seeing everyone there next week! Have a good TechEd!

Excited to be speaking at TechEd this year

CoreyRoth — Mon, 16 Apr 2012 17:48:29 GMT

I am excited to say that I’ll be speaking at both TechEd North America and TechEd Europe. This is my first time to even attend a TechEd so I am looking forward to see what is in store. Both events are sure to be exciting but I am particularly excited to be going to Amsterdam for TechEd Europe since I haven’t been in 10+ years. If you’re at either event, be sure and check out my session on Making the most of Search with SharePoint Online. There you will learn some great tricks on how to get more out of your search experience in the cloud. Links to my sessions are below.

TechEd North America

TechEd Europe

If you’re going to be at either event let me know. I am looking forward to seeing old friends and meeting some new people.

Follow me on twitter: @coreyroth

How to: Use the Silverlight web part with Visual Studio 11

CoreyRoth — Wed, 25 Jan 2012 14:11:14 GMT

Visual Studio 11 adds a new feature that makes working with Silverlight in SharePoint 2010 a bit easier. The new Silverlight Web Part feature automates deploying your Silverlight applications to SharePoint and can really save you a bit of time. We took a look at how the Visual Web Part works in VS11 a while back. Now, let’s see what happens when we use Silverlight.

To work with Silverlight,you can either create a new project or simply add a new item to an existing project. I’ll start by creating a new project by choosing the item SharePoint 2010 Silverlight Web Part. Remember the number of project types has been reduced in VS11.

After you provide the usual SharePoint specific information, a new screen will prompt you for information on your Silverlight application. You can use an existing application or let it create a new project for you.

You have a choice of Silverlight version 4.0 or 5.0. Once you finish, you’ll have two new projects to work with. The designer opens up and then we’ll just create a simple Silverlight application.

Now, let’s take a look at the files. They prove to be a lot simpler than you might think.

If we click on the web part itself, we actually see the contents of the .webpart file. Taking a quick look at it, reveals its simplicity.

<?xml version="1.0" encoding="utf-8"?>
<webParts>
  <webPart xmlns="http://schemas.microsoft.com/WebPart/v3">
    <metaData>
      <type name="Microsoft.SharePoint.WebPartPages.SilverlightWebPart, Microsoft.SharePoint, Version=14.0.0.0, Culture=neutral, PublicKeyToken=71e9bce111e9429c, processorArchitecture=MSIL" />
      <importErrorMessage>$Resources:core,ImportErrorMessage;</importErrorMessage>
    </metaData>
    <data>
      <properties>
        <property name="Title" type="string">SilverlightWebPartProject1 - SilverlightWebPart1</property>
        <property name="Description" type="string">My Silverlight Web Part</property>
        <property name="Height" type="unit">300px</property>
        <property name="Width" type="unit">400px</property>
        <property name="Url" type="string">/SiteAssets/SilverlightWebPartProject1/SilverlightWebPart1/SilverlightProject1.xap</property>
      </properties>
    </data>
  </webPart>
</webParts>

It simply has a reference to the existing SilverlightWebPart included in SharePoint 2010. It sets a few properties such as Title, Description, Height, Width, and Url. Here you will notice that it’s actually copying the .xap file from your Silverlight project into the SiteAssets library. Note, that this is the only place to set the dimensions of your web part.

<?xml version="1.0" encoding="utf-8"?>
<Elements xmlns="http://schemas.microsoft.com/sharepoint/" >
  <Module Name="SilverlightWebPart1" List="113" Url="_catalogs/wp">
    <File Path="SilverlightWebPart1\SilverlightWebPart1.webpart" Url="SilverlightWebPartProject1_SilverlightWebPart1.webpart" Type="GhostableInLibrary" >
      <Property Name="Group" Value="Custom" />
    </File>
  </Module>
  <Module Name="SilverlightWebPart1">
    <File Path="SilverlightWebPart1\SilverlightProject1.xap" Url="SiteAssets/SilverlightWebPartProject1/SilverlightWebPart1/SilverlightProject1.xap" />
  </Module>
</Elements>

If we take a look at the Elements.xml file, we see that it deploys both the .webpart file and the .xap file using a Module element.

When you are ready to deploy just use the Deploy command in Visual Studio. It will build the Silverlight application, the .wsp file and send it to SharePoint. You no longer have to manually upload the .xap file (or add it manually to your package). Now, we can just add the web part to a page from the Insert ribbon.

Then you’ll have your Silverlight application on your page. Don’t be jealous of how great this one looks. :)

What about SharePoint Online? Does it work there too? Indeed it does. Just use the Publish feature I talked about earlier to deploy that solution to the cloud. One issue I did notice is that the path configured in the SilverlightWebPart is absolute. If you publish into a site collection not on the root, you’ll need to modify the path. I need to look at this one more since it might be based off of the local SharePoint site URL that you specified originally. Still it’s nice to know that it works. I tried it with an E3 account and I’m pretty sure it will work with P accounts as well.

How to: Query sites and site collections using SharePoint Search

CoreyRoth — Fri, 13 Jan 2012 19:41:21 GMT

I often refer to my Handy Keywords in SharePoint Search because it forms the building blocks you need to become a rock star at writing SharePoint keyword queries. Today, I want to expand upon that post on how you can use search to return a list of sites or site collections. This is useful when you want to quickly inspect a SharePoint farm using the Search Center. The secret behind returning sites with Search is use of the contentclass managed property. You just have to know what value to specify. To return a list of all sites in the search index, we specify a value of STS_Web (remember our translation guide). Here is what it looks like.

contentclass:"STS_Web"

This works pretty well. However, if you inspect the results on your own server, you might quickly notice one thing missing. The root web of all the site collections is not present in the search results. To get the site collections, we specify STS_Site instead.

contentclass:"STS_Site"

Notice, I now have all of the site collections on my particular tenant. If you want the results combined, you simply combine the queries.

contentclass:"STS_Site" contentclass:"STS_Web"

Now you might be thinking this is great, but you don’t want every site and site collection on the farm. You want to restrict it to a particular web application. That’s actually pretty easy, just refer back to the handy keywords post and use the Site managed property. In my case, I’ll restrict the URL to my main web application.

contentclass:"STS_Site" contentclass:"STS_Web" site:https://dotnetmafia.sharepoint.com

There are lots of ways to get lists of sites in SharePoint, but I find this one works well since it doesn’t require a line of code for you to try. Of course, as a developer, you can make use of this with the KeywordQuery class inside your own application. This works with SharePoint on-premises as well as SharePoint Online. All screenshots were from my personal SPO site.

Slides from my talk at SharePoint Saturday Denver

CoreyRoth — Mon, 14 Nov 2011 15:13:57 GMT

I had the honor of speaking at SharePoint Saturday Denver this weekend. Clayton Cobb (@warrtalon) and the people from Denver did a great job putting together this event. I spoke about how to improve your SharePoint Search experience. I’ve uploaded my slides to SlideShare at the link below. Denver was fun, but I have learned this weekend that the mountains aren’t for me. :) This was a great event and certainly one I will remember.

Making the most of SharePoint Search

The code for the advanced search application I demoed can be found in this post. The customization you can make to add a View Folder link to your search results, can be found in this post.

Follow me on twitter.

Speaking at SharePoint Conference 2011 (#SPC11)

CoreyRoth — Fri, 16 Sep 2011 04:02:47 GMT

Since I first stepped foot at #SPC09, I knew I wanted to speak at a SharePoint Conference some day.. This year that dream has finally become a reality. I have the honor to present two different sessions at SharePoint Conference 2011. I am speaking on subjects that are both old and new to me and I am excited to see how they turn out.

My first talk is #SPC348 – Extending SharePoint 2010 for your customers and partners will cover everything you wanted to know about creating an Extranet with SharePoint 2010. Although, this topic is nothing new, this is a great talk for people just now looking to consider an extranet for his or her organization.

My second talk is #SPC364 – Making the most of Search in SharePoint Online. I am beyond excited about this talk because I get to talk about Search and SharePoint Online in the same talk. You might just be amazed at what you can do with Search in the cloud. I’ve got some great demos built using Silverlight and the Search API that you will want to see whether you want to extend search off-premises or on-premises.

I’m looking forward to giving my sessions and seeing all of my friends out there in the SharePoint community. I’m excited to meet some new friends out there as well. If you’re going to be in Anaheim this year for the conference, feel free to say hi and check out my sessions. Thanks for all of your support especially for all my friends at the Houston SharePoint Users Group (#HSPUG) I’ll see you all in Cali.

How to: Share SharePoint Online sites with external users (Office 365)

CoreyRoth — Wed, 10 Aug 2011 18:15:44 GMT

One of the coolest features unique to SharePoint Online is the ability to share sites with external users. I’ve noticed the functionality was there throughout the beta but I believe I hadn’t actually been able to get it to work until GA. Even then, it took checking a number of settings before I could actually get it to work. You can share content with external users by using the new Share Site menu item in the Site Actions menu. When you start with a new out-of-the-cloud site collection, you will get a screen that looks like this.

Notice the key text on the screen:

Invitations to users outside your organization are currently disabled.

To enable this, there are a few things to check. First go to Tenant administration. Your URL is usually something like https://mydomain-admin.sharepoint.com. Go to the Manage Site Collections page and click Settings –> Manage External Users. Make sure you don’t have any site collections selected otherwise Settings will be disabled. Make sure the Allow radio button is selected. It is more than likely set to this by default.

Once you have confirmed this setting, go back to the root site of your site collection and go to Site Settings and then Site Collection Features. Here you will want to enable the feature External User Invitations.

Now, if you go back to the Share Site menu in Site Actions, you will now be able to enter E-mail addresses and the window will no longer have the warning about invitations being disabled.

I noticed it usually takes a few minutes for the E-mail to show up so be patient. When the E-mail arrives, you will see something like this giving the user a link to click on to join.

Clicking on the link takes the user to a page prompting them to login. They must use a Windows Live or Microsoft Online Services ID to login.

One thing to note is that the E-mail address associated with the Windows Live Id does not have to be the same as the E-mail you sent the user.

Don’t bother E-mailing me at that address, I never check it. As an administrator, you can now also manage this user in the Site Permissions page like any other user.

At this point, it seems like the user can do whatever they need to on the site with the users you provided. I’m not really sure how the licensing works in this scenario. These users don’t show up in the licensing page so I guess you don’t have to license them. Maybe an SPO licensing expert will chime in. :) There may also be additional limitations that I have yet to discover. If you find some be sure and share them with us.

Office 365 How to: Create a public facing website with SharePoint Online

CoreyRoth — Fri, 15 Apr 2011 15:56:44 GMT

I had been told from the beginning that you can create “simple” public facing websites with SharePoint Online / Office 365. However, I had never seen the setting a place to create the public web site in the beta until recently. If you go to tenant administration (located at https://yourname-admin.sharepoint.com) and go to the Site Collections page, there is a new option under the New button in the ribbon.

Clicking on the button, presents you with a dialog asking you about your new public website. There are quite a few options to configure so let’s take a look at them.

After you provide a Title for the site you are asked to provide a URL for the public site. However, by default, the only option you have is http://yourname-web.sharepoint.com. However, you can use your own name if you configure your DNS settings in the Office 365 administration page. I’ll just use the default URL here for today. You are then also prompted for a default language and time zone. Further down the screen you will see a few more options which are required.

You must provide an administrator for the site and then you also have to provide a storage quota and resource usage quota. These require values, so I usually just put in 1000 for each. It’s hard to know at this point how many “resources” a typical site might need. Hopefully, there will be some official guidance on this at some point. Once you do say ok, give it a few minutes to create your new site collection.

When it’s finished provisioning your site collection, you’ll see it in the list.

You are now ready to check out your new public facing web site with SharePoint Online. What does it look like? Take a look at the image below or go to http://sbti-web.sharepoint.com and check it out for yourself.

As you can see it actually creates a simple site with a Page Library. It actually looks nothing like SharePoint either. Clicking on the Member Login link takes you to the Page Library itself where you can edit the pages.

Clicking on one of the pages allows you to start editing.

One issue I did have is that even though I am an administrator I can’t see all of the administration options in the Site Actions menu.

I’m not sure if this is a bug or by design. I’ll probably post something in the forums and ask. However, you can still get to the Site Settings page by going to /_layouts/settings.aspx. Here, you can get to the solutions gallery, master pages, features, etc.. You should be able to brand the site just like you would any other SharePoint site using SharePoint Designer and / or sandboxed solutions with Visual Studio 2010.

That’s a quick look at the public facing site options with Office 365. From my understanding, this is meant for simple public sites and not the equivalent of FIS. I think if you try to build a site or hundreds of thousands of users per day, you’ll quickly exceed your resource quota. However, it’s great for simple brochure type sites that are easy to manage.

Office 365 How to: Build and Deploy a Web Part with SharePoint Online

CoreyRoth — Fri, 01 Apr 2011 16:08:28 GMT

You know by now that the cloud is hot and Microsoft says “we’re all in”. That being said, there has never been a better time to push all of those chips forward and jump on the bandwagon. It’s time to get some experience with SharePoint Online / Office 365. I know most people don’t have access to the Office 365 beta yet, but when it opens up, you should sign up for the public beta and start getting familiar with it. If you haven’t seen SharePoint Online yet, check our my previous article which gives a quick tour of it. I plan to write more about SharePoint Online in the future, so I figured the best place to start is with an introductory development article on building and deploying a web part. My past series on building and deploying web parts to 2010 and 2007 are still the most popular articles on DotNetMafia.com. Let’s take what we learned there and see how we deploy web parts to the cloud.

Before we get started, let’s reiterate what we’re working with. With Office 365, your development scenario involves sandboxed solutions. As you know, these solutions are deployed to the site collection level and offer a restricted subset of the SharePoint API. If you are already confortable working with sandboxed solutions, you are in great shape to begin SharePoint Online development.

What does the development environment look like? Well, you know that SharePoint 2010 VM you already have? You’re looking at it. Just like Azure, SharePoint Online development also used the “Over the fence” development methodology. Meaning, you develop your code locally and then throw it over the fence and hope it works. This may sound bad, but it’s really not a big deal and the Azure people have been doing it for a while. AppFabric is close to Azure, but there is always a possibility of differences when you get it in the cloud. As long as you build a sandboxed solution and don’t make use of unsupported features (i.e.: PerformancePoint, BCS, etc), more than likely your code will work when it gets to the cloud. There may be things that you can do in a Sandboxed solution in SharePoint 2010 compared to SharePoint Online, but it’s far too early to tell at this point. To get started developing web parts in the cloud, you pretty much need a copy of SharePoint 2010 (or SharePoint Foundation) installed somewhere locally. This could be native on your Windows 7 machine or inside a virtual machine. Wherever it is, you will obviously need Internet access to get your code to the cloud.

To get started developing in the cloud, the first step is to build the web part on your local SharePoint environment. I won’t go through all the steps here, because most of them are the same from my article on 2010 Web Part Development. However, I will go through the important steps. The first step is to create a new Empty SharePoint 2010 Project in Visual Studio 2010. Specify the URL to a local site on your SharePoint server. Don’t use the address of your SharePoint Online site. It won’t work. When prompted for the solution type, choose Sandboxed Solution.

At this point, you have a regular SharePoint project in Visual Studio. Add a web part to the project just like you would in SharePoint 2010. Sticking with the Hello World type example, we put some code like the following in our web part.

using System;

using System.ComponentModel;

using System.Web;

using System.Web.UI;

using System.Web.UI.WebControls;

using System.Web.UI.WebControls.WebParts;

using Microsoft.SharePoint;

using Microsoft.SharePoint.WebControls;

namespace SharePointOnlineProject3.HelloCloudWebPart

{

    [ToolboxItemAttribute(false)]

    public class HelloCloudWebPart : WebPart

    {

        protected override void CreateChildControls()

        {

            Controls.Add(new Label() { Text = "Hello, Cloud!" });

        }

    }

}

At this point, we can test our code locally on our SharePoint server. Build and deploy the project and then add your web part to a test page on your site. Again, if you aren’t familiar with these steps, take a look at my Building and Deploying Web Parts with SharePoint 2010 post. If the code, works you should see a similar page like the one below.

Now, we’re ready to send our web part “to the cloud!”. How do we do that? Start by using the Package menu to build a SharePoint package (.wsp file).

This creates a .wsp file located in the bin folder of the project. We’ll use this file to deploy our web part to the cloud. It’s now time to open up a browser and connect to your instance of SharePoint Online. Once you get there, we deploy a sandboxed solution just like we would on-premises. Go to Site Settings –> Solutions to view the Solutions Gallery. Click on the Solutions button in the ribbon, and then click Upload Solution. Browse to the bin folder of your Visual Studio project and select the file ending in .wsp. Once it uploads, be sure and click the Activate button.

Now, you just need to ensure the feature is activated by going to Site Settings –> Site Collection Features. If it is not activated, click the activate button.

Your web part has now been thrown over the fence and deployed to the cloud! Test it out by going to any page on the site and adding the web part to the page. You’ll find your web part in the Custom section by default. If all goes well, your web part should work here too.

Congratulations, you have now deployed code to the cloud! It’s really not that hard is it? Now, you might be wondering if you can debug your solution. Unfortunately, the answer is no. If you have an issue, you have to step through it locally on your on-premises SharePoint server. That’s all there is to getting started with SharePoint Online development. As you can see it’s very familiar to sandboxed solutions development with your on-premises server.

A quick look at SharePoint Online in Office 365

CoreyRoth — Tue, 08 Mar 2011 02:56:31 GMT

We’ve been hearing about the new version of SharePoint Online in the cloud under the Office 365 umbrella for some time now, so I was excited when my company (Stonebridge) got our beta invite. I’m just going to be talking about SharePoint Online today. I’ll let the smart people who know about Exchange and Lync cover those products. :) It was really easy to set up. It prompted me for some basic information including what I want my subdomain to be. I chose our company name which is used for various URLs throughout the environment. You can also use your own domain name as well, but that’s beyond the scope of this trial run.

The first thing you might be wondering is what does it look like. Well it looks a lot like the SharePoint 2010 you know and love, but there are some differences. It takes a while for your SharePoint site to be provisioned but you have immediate access to Exchange and Lync. While SharePoint is being provisioned, you won’t see any links for it in the administration control panel. You have to wait a while. Once it does get created, when you visit the URL for your site you get prompted with a somewhat familiar login page.

Once you login, you get see a familiar SharePoint site. In this case I used the blank site template.

I mentioned some things are different. When you go to create a new site, take a look at this:

It’s a new addition to the New Site Silverlight application which has featured site definitions. A new site template is available called the Express Site. This appears to be a new site template based upon the Team Site minus the Calendar, Tasks, and the Discussion Board.

There’s more though. If I edit the page and choose Add New Web Part, I am welcomed with a new Silverlight application to pick web parts.

Take note that there are currently web parts in the list that likely will not work because they use features not available in the cloud.

The Site Collection Settings page looks pretty similar but there are definitely fewer links but I haven’t done a real comparison yet.

Search appears to work by itself. A search center was configured out-of-the-box and I did not have to make any configuration. There is no direct navigation to it, but you can search from the master page as usual. Also of note is that there is currently no way to get to the Search Service Application through Central Administration, so you can’t make any configuration changes there. You can still create scopes at the site collection level. However, if you want to create your own managed properties, I don’t think there is an option currently.

Speaking of Central Administration. It doesn’t really exist. There is an administration site accessible at https://yourname-admin.sharepoint.com but you won’t see the central admin site you know. It’s a limited tenant-type administration page. Currently, you can only configure site collections, send to connections, InfoPath Form Services, User Profile Service Application, and the Managed Metadata Term Store. Clicking on any of the links will bring you to familiar screens to manage those components.

If you are like me, you probably have had questions about SharePoint Online and other aspects of Office 365. Here are the answers to a few questions that I think many of us have had.

Q: Do I have remote desktop or file system access to my SharePoint server?

A: No. From what I can tell, you have no physical access to the server whatsoever. If you can’t make the configuration change using the web browser or Visual Studio, it’s not going to happen.

Q: How do users login? Do they need different usernames and passwords?

A: Accounts can be created manually or they can be bulk uploaded via CSV file. You can also synchronize accounts with your on-premises Active Directory. This creates copies of the user accounts and allows global address list synchronization in Exchange You can also setup identity federation and use Active Directory Federation Services (ADFS 2.0) to authenticate into Office 365 as well. I think both of these options provide the same functionality, but it sounds like there is more work involved in the setup. It sounds like a better solution though.

Q: Can I develop custom applications using Visual Studio?

A: Yes, but you can use Sandboxed Solutions. You have to develop the solution on a local SharePoint server and then manually upload the solution package to the Solutions gallery in “the cloud”.

Q: Can I host anonymous sites?

A: I would love to know the answer to that myself. I haven’t seen an option. I hope so.

Q: Can I create multiple web applications?

A: By the looks of it, you don’t have the ability to add additional web applications. I could be wrong though and I just haven’t figure out how to do it yet.

Q: Can you use PowerShell?

A: I know you can use PowerShell remoting for Exchange tasks. I’m unsure if SharePoint is supported or not.

Q: Is Feature X supported in SharePoint Online?

A: I always refer to this document to determine what is and is not supported in SharePoint Online.

Q: Is SharePoint Designer supported?

A: I connected to the site and it appears to work fine.

That’s it for now. I plan on posting more specifics on the things you can do in SharePoint Online in subsequent posts. This post was based on publically available information.