To prevent SharePoint Online customers from feeling boxed in, Microsoft wants to improve the way they upload and store documents in the cloud collaboration server.Over the coming weeks, Microsoft will roll out a set of changes to Office 365 targeted at SharePoint Online users, including increasing from 250MB to 2GB the size of files that people can upload to their individual SkyDrive Pro repositories and to SharePoint Online team site document libraries, the company said on Thursday in a blog post.
The enhancements are in response to companies' increased use of Office 365, according to the blog post's author, Mark Kashman. "Users are uploading more documents to SkyDrive Pro, teams are building numerous team sites to work with internal teams as well as with external customers and partners, and companies are establishing their corporate intranet sites," he wrote.In addition to lifting the size limit on individual uploads, Microsoft has expanded the types of files that can be uploaded by adding .exe and .dll files.
Another change will be to increase from 3,000 to 10,000 the number of site collections -- groups of websites organized hierarchically -- that an Office 365 Enterprise customer can create. This improvement will not be applied to Office 365 Small Business and Midsize Business customers.
Microsoft is also prolonging the time that discarded documents remain in SharePoint Online recycle bins from 30 days to 90 days to give users more chance to recover these items. In addition, retaining multiple versions of Office 365 documents will be on by default on newly created SkyDrive Pro libraries.
Thursday's announcement comes shortly after Microsoft increased SkyDrive Pro storage from 7GB to 25GB and doubled the size of Exchange Online mailboxes to 50GB.Microsoft is in a dogfight with Google, as Office 365 and Google Apps battle for customers large and small that are looking to move their email, calendaring, office apps and other collaboration and productivity tools to a vendor-hosted public cloud service.
Microsoft Research gets scientific with cloud
Microsoft Research has launched a new program designed to encourage the use of its Azure cloud computing program by scientists and other researchers.
The new Windows Azure for Research program was unveiled today and will award some 100 grants of computing resources on Microsoft's cloud for scientific research every year. Proposals will be accepted at any time, but awarded six times a year. The deadline for the first round of grants is 15 October.
Microsoft Research said it will periodically issue RFPs on particular topics that it is interested in support. The organisation will also start a series of training events for researchers and an annual Windows Azure for Research event.Microsoft earlier this year added an Australian region to Windows Azure. The software vendor launched sub-regions in Victoria and New South Wales.
Microsoft is accelerating a global expansion of its data center infrastructure to support growth in its Azure cloud services and Xbox Live gaming service. At a time when many cloud builders are debating whether to build or buy their data center space, Microsoft is doing both.
Microsoft has long been one of the Internet’s master builders, investing $15 billion in data centers that now house more than 1 million servers. It has construction projects underway in at least five locations across the globe, from Singapore to Des Moines. And now Microsoft has also become the biggest customer in the market for turn-key “wholesale” data centers.
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