If you are using Office 365 without federation with your on-premise Active directory you are obligated to change password for your cloud based identity every 90 days.

When using BPOS, this was not a large issue since you had the sign-in client that reminded you to change password in time.

But with Office 365 when you for example only are using SharePoint online, there is not yet a way to get password expiration reminders if the users are accessing SharePoint with the direct url (eg. https://mycompany.sharepoint.com). This means you potentially end up with users that cannot access SharePoint when their password has expired.

Until they’ve come up with a solution for password expiration reminders via email one workaround is to set the users passwords to never expire.

You do this with the Powershell module for Online services (http://onlinehelp.microsoft.com/Office365-enterprises/ff652560.aspx) with the following commands:

$cred = Get-Credentials 
Connect-MsolService -Credential $cred

For one user:

Set-MsolUser -UserPrincipalName user@example.com -PasswordNeverExpires $True

For all users:

Get-MsolUser | Set-MsolUser -PasswordNeverExpires $True

 

Note that this works for all Office 365 services that are using Azure Active Directory (Exchange Online, Lync Online and Sharepoint Online)