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Microsoft Releases Office 365 Status-Check Mobile App

Microsoft on Thursday unveiled a smartphone app that would let Office 365 administrators monitor the health of their service from their mobile devices.

The Office 365 Admin app is now available for Windows Phone 8 smartphones via the Windows Phone store here. For devices based on Apple iOS 7 and Google Android 4.2.1 and higher, the app will be released "in the coming weeks," according to this blog post by Lawrence Chiu, a senior product manager for Office 365.

The app requires an Office 365 subscription with administrator use rights. It does not support Windows Azure Active Directory Multi-Factor Authentication, Microsoft's recently launched product that enforces a secondary layer of identity authentication for its cloud services.

The app lets Office 365 administrators check the status of the Office 365 services they are subscribed to via their smartphones. They can monitor the health of their entire Office 365 environment or view particular services. Users can also adjust how frequently the app refreshes status data.

This Microsoft Garage Series video gives a quick demo of the app (starting at the 14:24 mark).

Microsoft first announced the Office 365 Admin app in August, indicating at the time that the app would launch by year's end. The app is part of Microsoft's efforts to be more transparent about Office 365's performance. Microsoft this summer took some steps toward that end, announcing that it would begin to release Office 365's quarterly uptime data to the public. Previously, that data was available only to Office 365 subscribers.

Currently, Microsoft's Office 365 Trust Center shows a worldwide uptime number of 99.96 percent for the quarter, though it does not say whether this takes into account Thursday's reported outages affecting several Microsoft cloud services, including Office 365. Microsoft defines an "uptime number" as "the number of minutes that the Office 365 service is available in a calendar month as a percentage of the total number of minutes in that month."

About the Author

Gladys Rama (@GladysRama3) is the editorial director of Converge360.

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