Office Infrastructure on the Cloud

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.

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.

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.

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.