Friday, February 19, 2010

BPOS anybody? – Business Productivity Online Services

  • Just signed up for a 30 day trial of BPOS, aka Microsoft hosted services in the cloud. It’s early days, but the basics are already up there. When Office 2010 & SharePoint 2010 are out, later this year, I hope to see BPOS provide Word/Excel/PowerPoint and maybe OneNote 2010 in the cloud, alongside the existing hosted services. Should be a winning solution as a light-touch, non-infrastructure solution for small to medium sized businesses; possibly large enterprise businesses as well, although some may prefer to handle their own infrastructure/data storage and security concerns
  • As a user with the Standard Business suite you get: Exchange Online, Live Meeting, Office Communications Online, SharePoint. With the Deskless worker suite, you get Exchange Online, SharePoint Online (read only)
  • If you have Outlook 2007 or the 2010 beta installed, you will be able to create a separate profile in Outlook to handle exchange mail or you can use OWA – Outlook Web App, cloud based email
  • Live Meeting 2007 can be based in the cloud (web based) or via the Live Meeting console. Communicator 2007 R2 can be cloud based or you can download the client. There is also a BPOS client that you can download which acts as a launch-pad. If you sign-in as a Desk-less user you get a minimal subset of functions (third graphic shown)
  • The administration is fairly straight forward for someone with limited technical skills, plus there is plenty of online help to configure Exchange and SharePoint etc. You can migrate your domain across and your Exchange accounts/MX records via downloadable tools. You can also do bulk uploads via a .CSV file

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