One of the great new capabilities in Office 365 is the extensive list of available PowerShell cmdlets for not only managing your Office 365 tenant, but also Exchange Online individually. Where in BPOS it was recommended to setup DirSync and extend your schema to include Exchange 2007 attributes, now you can use PowerShell commands to manage your Exchange Online environment almost as if it were on-premises; using the Exchange 2010 Management Console is an option as well.
Recently a client was hesitant to move directly to an ADFS 2.0 implementation, which would’ve allowed him to utilize his local Active Directory password policy via federation. However, despite his caution, he was not forced in to a Microsoft 90-day complex password policy separate from AD because PowerShell allowed him to turn off the complex password policy. (Note: that functionality may not exist long-term in Office 365) I do not condone any environment using a non-complex password policy, but the point is that this small business had the flexibility to override default settings and do what worked best for their business on an “as-needed” basis.
Managing groups of users via scripting for tasks other than migration is now a simple process, as is dumping data out for reporting. Whereas BPOS required a local schema extension for Exchange or a manual, one-by-one process to work through objects such as External Contacts, now they can be managed in bulk without additional changes to your local Active Directory environment. Office 365 has truly delivered a robust Exchange environment to the cloud.
The full list of commands available can be found here: http://help.outlook.com/en-us/140/dd575549.aspx.