Hi All,

Brian and I have been working on the back-end of Office 365 – SharePoint – and learning some of the in’s and out’s of how all of this comes together.

Microsoft has decided to drop the public facing website in the Office 365 offering and have you work from a 3rd party.

We will keep working on the Intranet SharePoint side and post as we get comfortable with how it all comes together, but will post a bit more regular on this change over to the 3rd partly hosting of the Internet side.

Here are some links to current information.

Office 365 message center posting from 1/5/15:

Answer from Office 365 community:

Hi Ed,

Yes Office 365 will discontinue the SharePoint Online Public Website feature. All Office 365 administrators who have provisioned SharePoint Online will receive a notification of this change in the Office 365 Message center.

The following website hosting companies currently partner with Office 365:

• GoDaddy
• Wix.com

Customers who currently use the SharePoint Online Public Website feature will continue to have access to the feature for a minimum of two years after the changeover date of March 9, 2015.  Moving forward, these customers will have the option of subscribing to third-party solutions for public website functionality and should plan to move to one of the third-party solutions within the next two years.

New customers who subscribe to Office 365 after the changeover date won’t have access to this feature. Moving forward, Office 365 customers will have access to industry-leading third-party offerings that will enable them to have a public website that provides a complete online solution and presence.

You can see this KB for more details: http://support2.microsoft.com/kb/3027254

Thanks,
Elaine