What do you do to get reliable service? Do you hire the best IT people on the market? Do you spend millions of dollars on the cutting edge hardware running the most cutting edge software?
Honestly, if you’re like most people, you will have a “good enough” system in place. This doesn’t mean that you have a solution that is held together with duct tape and chewing gum, but it does mean that there could always be an improvement somewhere in there. If you want to improve things like e-mail, collaboration or communication, Microsoft actually has quite a nice offering available!
What is BPOS?
BPOS stands for Business Productivity Online Suite and consists of a set of tools that allow a business to move some high maintenance services off-premise to be hosted in the “cloud.” What this means to the customer it that they have an option to have certain Microsoft products hosted by Microsoft and then they can consume that software as a service. This concept of “Software as a Service” is a really big deal at Microsoft right now, and it’s all over the business world. Virtualizing what used to be a desktop application and consuming it as a web page is the new way to enable workers to be productive on almost any hardware, almost anywhere.
What Software as a Service can I get?
The major components of the BPOS offerings are the normal server-based platform products that Microsoft offers for business productivity:
- Exchange Online – You get to have your e-mail hosted on an Exchange 2007 cluster with full accessibility via Outlook Anywhere, Outlook Web Access and ActiveSync. Right now each user starts off with a default of 5GB of mailbox storage space, but that may increase in the near future (you can increase it to 25GB right now, but 5 is the default).
- SharePoint Online – Using SharePoint, you get to take advantage of the rich collaboration tools such as document, calendar and task sharing; user based permissions; and workflow content management features.
- Office Live Meeting – Each user will have the ability to install the LiveMeeting client and create and participate in LiveMeeting events.
- Office Communications Online – One of my favorite features of the BPOS offering is that each company gets to use Microsoft Office Communications Server. With this product you have fully integrated IM and presence capabilities without having to install and configure a pretty complex product.
- Grab-bag of features from Forefront Online Protection for Exchange – With this added bonus, you get virus and spam filtering using Microsoft’s Forefront products.
In addition to those things, there are options that you can purchase to increase what you get out of the service from Archiving and Encryption of e-mail to Desktop Management using System Center Online Desktop Manager.
I’m a BIG company, is this offering right for me?
That is one of the beauties of the offerings provided by Microsoft Online Services! The service that I have been describing is aimed at smaller business (below 3000 seats). For our larger customers, there is another offering called BPOS-D with the “D” standing for Dedicated. This means that instead of being hosted in a multi-tenant environment, a specific set of servers will be set aside, just for you.
I’ll be posting more information about how the service works and some of the issues that companies have had to deal with in more posts in a whole BPOS series. Tune in for more!
To learn more about Microsoft Business Productivity Online Suite (BPOS), contact us and signup for a free 30 day BPOS trial here.
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Tags: BPOS, Microsoft Online Services
