Have you ever wished you could have enterprise level collaboration and communication software readily available without the hassle of downloading, installing, patching, and upgrading as well the additional server maintenance costs needed to run it?
If this concept peaks your interest, then Microsoft’s Business Productivity Online Suite (BPOS) offering could be a great fit for your needs.
What is BPOS?
Microsoft has bundled together a collection of services into their cloud environment and called this offering the Business Productivity Online Suite (BPOS). The suite contains Exchange for email, SharePoint for collaboration, Office Communicator for instant messaging and Office Live Meeting for screen sharing and live collaboration.
Exchange Online
Provide employees access to e-mail, calendar, and contacts from virtually anywhere, at any time, on desktops, laptops, and mobile devices—while helping to protect against malware and spam. Exchange Online can be rapidly deployed, flexibly expanded, and is designed to be securely administered using a powerful yet easy-to-use Web-based console.
SharePoint Online
Share documents, contacts, calendars, and tasks in a single location. Based on Microsoft Office SharePoint® Server 2007, SharePoint Online delivers rich collaboration capabilities that enable team members to flexibly and efficiently collaborate, find organizational resources, search your intranet site, and manage content and workflow.
Office Live Meeting
Connect with colleagues and customers through real-time meetings, training sessions, and events using only a PC with an Internet connection. Hosted Web conferencing services from Microsoft Office Live Meeting give your employees the power to collaborate wherever they are, to set up project meetings, brainstorm ideas, and collaborate on whiteboards without the cost and hassle of travel!
Office Communications Online
Enable users to find and rapidly connect with the right person from the applications they use most. Office Communications Online provides streamlined access to rich presence and instant messaging capabilities that are centrally managed by IT and work seamlessly with a range of Microsoft Office system programs.
Why should you consider using BPOS?
The goal of these online service offerings are to enhance productivity, collaboration and communication while reducing costs by freeing up resources associated with managing and maintaining software and hardware for on-premise servers. Another way of putting this is that businesses will be provided the latest technologies without the hassle of validating, installing, or creating back-out plans for patches, service packs, and new versions (such as migrating from Exchange 200x to Exchange 2010).
One of the main areas businesses are always concerned about is security & disaster recovery plans, especially when moving information to a location that is outside of their physical control. To settle these concerns, all of Microsoft’s online offerings come with financially backed SLAs with 99.9% uptime guarantee, secure access via SSL, Cyber Trust, SAS70 compliance, multi-layered antivirus and spam filtering, and geo-redundant data centers.
For those that already have on-premise servers established another option you are presented with is the concept of coexistence. This will allow businesses to retain their established Active Directory and Exchange servers with the ability to work alongside their BPOS implementation through the use of AD synchronization and Exchange migration tools.
-
The AD synchronization is one-way, from on-premise to cloud, so there is no risk to your on-premise AD implementation.
-
For the Exchange migration from on-premise to online, this can be performed on an account-by-account basis in order to allow for the establishment of a migration plan or you can choose to migrate specific users and leave the rest using the on-premise server.
What does the future of BPOS hold?
As of today, the service offerings included in BPOS are based upon the 2007 software offerings. Unfortunately there currently are some noticeable gaps between the on-premise and online functionality, mainly around SharePoint Online. However, with the release of Exchange 2010 and SharePoint 2010 there are plans in the works to get the online offerings up-to-speed to match the on-premise functionality.
It is important to note that you will not be forced to automatically update to 2010 features. You will be presented with the option to upgrade in order to allow a planned transition to newer features and functionality.
Discussion
No comments yet.