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Office Infrastructure on the Cloud

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PCQ Bureau
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Microsoft Exchange and Windows SharePoint Services/Microsoft Office

SharePoint Server (WSS/MOSS) have become ubiquitous in their usage in most

modern tech-enabled companies. However, this comes with its own set of issues —

you need to obtain and maintain the network infrastructure, manage licenses for

each user, manage security, updates and backups and more. Not only that, when a

new version of the base software comes up, you need to migrate the servers,

increase capacity/load and more. This requires an entire team of specialists on

call or on site for ensuring smooth operations.

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This is where Microsoft's IaaS cloud offering helps — whether you are running

a 5 member company from your basement or a 50,000 member global conglomerate.

Microsoft Business Productivity Online Suite or simply BPOS is a cloud offering

that takes care of all the issues mentioned above of hosting services for your

organization.

BPOS is actually a suite of 4 different products/services from Microsoft. It

comes with Exchange Online, SharePoint Online, Office Live Meeting and Office

Communications Online. A quick recap of each are:

Exchange Online: It is a cloud-based MS Exchange offering in BPOS. It

offers the full suite of the product, 25GB of mailbox size / user, ActiveSync/BlackBerry

support, MAPI, POP, IMAP, SMTP, HTTPS based access and free, unlimited resource

(like conference room, item, etc.) scheduling.

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SharePoint Online: MOSS on the cloud, so to speak. You get all the

features of SharePoint, including branding etc. and comes with a huge bunch of

pre-installed site templates. The only limitation here is that you cannot deploy

a custom application on top of this hosted SharePoint.

Live Meeting: It is a cloud offering to arrange voice/video meetings,

trainings, webcasts and other events. You can create, attend, view and manage

any kind of online meeting with this. The best part is that you can invite

attendees to a live meeting without requiring them to have an account in your

organization.

Communications Online: This is the corporate IM service from Microsoft

that allows users within the organization to communicate with each other through

text, voice or video. This feature alone can help reduce telephone call costs in

your organization significantly.

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Each of these services can of course be purchased separately. There are even

more options in the form of the Deskless Worker type license that comes at a low

price. If you want more than one service for a user, it might actually make more

sense to simply purchase the entire BPOS suite.

The advantage of these IaaS services is that if you're a small organization,

you don't need a dedicated IT team to manage servers, updates, etc. Simply

managing your organization's user accounts from the simple Web based interface

is good enough. If you're a mid-sized organization, a small IT team can manage

things like AD synchronization with BPOS so that users are managed automatically

as soon as changes are made in the local ADS. Large organizations can opt-in for

the BPOS dedicated offering where MS will actually setup dedicated servers for

you.

Apart from these services, there are a bunch of “add-on” services as well

that are available for purchase — such as message archival, encryption, advanced

filtering and others. You can even create a setup where only the top management

of the organization is on BPOS, while the rest of the company uses normal POP/IMAP/SMTP

accounts from any ISP. This is however a slightly more complex setup and you

will require some assistance in setting this up correctly.

There are other messaging solutions available that aim at the corporate world

— such as the Gmail Premium services. However, none of these have the integrated

experience as well as the plethora of options and features that BPOS is able to

offer. For instance, Gmail doesn't have the concept of “Shared Calendars” and

“Free/Busy” that is important when you wish to setup meetings or appointments

with others. There is also no integrated services such as Live Meeting or

SharePoint to further enhance the messaging and collaboration in the

organization. Overall BPOS service — both individually and as a whole — give a

much better cloud based offering for managing infrastructure than almost any

other solution out there.

If you're sick and tired of mail outages, large attachments on email, high

telephone costs, do take a look at Microsoft's Online Services. You might end up

saving lot of money.

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