It’s Ignite week this week, and although I’m disappointed that I’m not able to attend, I will be doing my best to keep abreast of all the Office 365, Exchange and Azure news!

The best piece of news so far, particularly for larger Office 365 customers, is the announcement of the ExpressRoute Service Providers for Office 365. This technology provides a private, managed connection to Office 365, giving you the equivalent of a direct MPLS connection into Office 365 datacentres. Multiple links can be used to provide redundancy, however each ExpressRoute circuit provides 2 active physical connections for built in redundancy.

This service will be available starting this Summer, and initially in the UK BT will be the only provider able to offer ExpressRoute for Office 365, however this will be expanded in the months following General Availability.

The full provider list for the UK at the time of writing consists of:

BT / Colt / Level3 / Orange / Tata / Verizon

More information is available on the Office Blog: http://blogs.office.com/2015/05/04/announcing-first-network-partners-to-offer-expressroute-for-office-365/