Outlook Live URL changes

Quoting from an email Microsoft sent, we want to remind you about upcoming URL requirements for accessing Outlook Live. Due date: June 30, 2011. It's already been extended so now is a good time to get it all done.

URL Changes

URLs that go directly to Outlook Web App, such as http://outlook.com or http://outlook.com/owa should be changed to go to http://outlook.com/ - for example, http://outlook.com/contoso.edu. To prepare for URL changes:

Inform your users of the change so that they can update any bookmarks they may have Inform your support desk of the upcoming changes and how to help users use the new URL Update any related links on Web pages and in documentation

If you are using the URL http://outlook.com/ecp to access the Exchange control panel management interface, you will also want to modify that URL to look like this: http://outlook.com/ecp/?realm=contoso.edu.

Single Sign-On Changes

Single sign-on solutions using the Live@edu SSO toolkit must make the following changes:

Update the Outlook URL in the web.config file as follows: Change: https://outlook.com/owa”> To: https://outlook.com/edu”> Custom solutions have to make this change also, though the location will vary. In addition, we have seen some cases where Live ID removes URL parameters, resulting in undesired behavior. To mitigate this issue, we advise that all single-sign-on solutions add the parameter exsvurl=1 as a setting in the URL. This setting will force the URL parameters to be preserved. Typically, the setting is appended to the end of the redirection URL and preceded with an ampersand, like this: https://outlook.com/edu&exsvurl=1.