During this busy holiday season, the cloud never stops improving. Office 365 is frequently updated to provide the best possible user experience.

This quarterly update provides a list of tasks that are needed as part of ongoing Office 365 operations, respective of your environment:

Update MX record in DNS
With the upgrade of Online Protection for Exchange, many customers have failed to notice that Microsoft has updated their MX record. Click View DNS Settings in the Domain Manager of the Office 365 Admin portal. The new MX format is domain-com.mail.protection.outlook.com.

Upgrade to the latest version of Internet Explorer
Office 365 works with the current and previous version of Internet Explorer. Download Internet Explorer 11 for Windows 7, or go to the Windows Store to update to Windows 8.1.

Upgrade your Office 365 SharePoint Online site collections now
Upgrade your site collections now. If you haven’t upgraded, your users are missing out on the new SharePoint Online experience, including the updated look-and-feel, easier collaboration with people outside your organization, drag-and-drop from your desktop to the browser, and more. Microsoft will start triggering the site
upgrade automatically in April 2014.

Upgrade your Office 365 SharePoint Online MySites now
Don’t miss out on new features for users with SkyDrive Pro, a personal library for storing and organizing documents in the cloud and keeping them synchronized on your laptop for offline access. If you haven’t already done so, Microsoft will start triggering the MySite upgrades automatically in January 2014. Enable upgrades for your MySites.

Install critical updates for Outlook 2007 and Outlook 2010
To ensure connectivity to Exchange Online after the planned service update for deployment after April 8, 2014, Run Windows Update to detect and install critical software updates. Note, Office 2007 left mainstream support in October 2012, so make plans to upgrade to the latest version of Office.

Try the Office 365 Free Trial for 30 Days.

Published by Kevin Fream

Many people don't understand their current situation and become frustrated in business and life, so I created the Delta Method and wrote the #1 Best-Seller "Change Your Game" - as featured at Harvard and NASDAQ as well as national TV news. Streamline your technology for competitive advantage using vetted IT support and take a divergent approach to personal growth. View all posts by Kevin Fream