Microsoft Online Services has Some Limitations
Recently I had emailed Kevin Wang to find out who I talk to about SharePoint Online. I had some questions about Microsoft Online Services that both we and our customers were asking. Kevin put me in touch with Troy Hopwood, in which he answered the following questions.
Q. Is there a way to create a public facing SharePoint Site?
A. In the current release, anonymous access is not supported. This means there is no way to create a public facing SharePoint Site with SharePoint Online. Many people have requested this so we’re definitely looking at this.
Q. Community Server SharePoint Package – I had tried to install CommunityServerSPDeploy.wsp into SharePoint Online. I than tried to add/build some of the web parts; this also did not work. I can see a benefit to hosting applications like Community Server Evolution in a cloud. Right now I am seeing some of the same issues when we hosted SharePoint on Windows Terminal Services (in fact this looks to be the same). Any ideas on how we could possibly do this? I think for SharePoint to truly be a service in the cloud there is going to have to be more scalability. I know its coming and there is a lot of work to be done.
Also take a look at these conversations on twitter.com
http://www.tweet2tweet.com/lliu/tunis/
http://www.tweet2tweet.com/joeloleson/tunis/
A. SharePoint Online does not support deploying custom code. This means solutions, web parts, coded workflows, etc. Again, this is something that we’re looking at.
Q. Exchange – in Exchange Online “Documents” go to the “Open Location”. It says “Type the address of the Windows SharePoint Services server or Windows file share to open:” If I put the url assign to you for your SharePoint Online site in here, this does not work. What do you use to make this work?
A. For this, I assume you are talking about the documents tab on the Outlook Web Access client? I just tried to open a location using a SharePoint Online site and was not able to get it working either. I am not familiar with this feature and whether or not it should be supported so I’ll pass this along to a few other people and see what I can find out.