Taybridge Consulting

The concept of cloud computing is growing leaps and bounds and Microsoft is getting especially bullish on moving clients into a hosted or cloud environment.

The Redmond crew have offered BPOS for some time now.  BPOS or Business Productivity OnLine Suite to give it is official name is a set of messaging and collaboration tools or in other words hosted Exchange, SharePoint and LiveMeeting.  Clients pay for this on a monthly fee. Microsoft provides and manages all the hardware and system software. The benefits are that you get enterprise level applications and IT services as a subscription.  The price is £6.71 per user per month.

However the life of BPOS is limited and so it should be. It is based on old versions of Exchange Server and SharePoint. Microsoft has been shipping Office 2010, Exchange 2010 and SharePoint 2010 for some time now and not to offer them in the cloud has been crazy. BPOS dies in the summer to be replaced by Office 365

Introducing Office 365:

What is Office 365?  

Productivity and Collaboration

Office 365 helps connect people in new ways. Users get all the productivity benefits of Microsoft Office along with the power of cloud services. Work together in real time, both inside and outside your organisation. See other users’ availability and make it easier to stay connected and take advantage of social networking capabilities to tap into the knowledge base of your organisation.

Access Anywhere

With Office 365 your people can more securely reach the information they need – including email, documents, contacts, and calendars – in the office or on the go. That means having a virtual office, virtually anywhere.

PC, Phone, Browser

Office 365 is designed to work with the software, devices, phones, and browsers already in your arsenal. This gives your workers the power to access information and stay productive across all means of access while maintaining security and still keeping your existing business applications.

Works with what you know

With Office 365 there is no need for you or your staff to learn new software and different tools. It’s the same Microsoft Outlook and Microsoft Office applications you use every day – now powered by and working seamlessly with our cloud services.

So what it is:

Office 365 is many things and Microsoft makes understanding it difficult. They tell you loads and loads of marketing stuff but very few facts as to what it is.

At a high level Office 365 is a collection of Key Enterprise Apps hosted in a Microsoft cloud. The key component are:

Email and Calendar – Outlook with a 25Gb mail box

SharePoint – Hosted

Lync On-line – This replaces that dreadfull application LiveMeeting, which in turn replaced NetMeeting. Lync lets you share desktops, IM and video calls and manage on-line meetings.

Office Web apps – Running versions of Word, Excel and One Note in a browser.

And this is packaged up into a single service with a 99.9% uptime guarantee.

And it’s coming soon. The Public beta has just started. Sign up here http://www.microsoft.com/en-us/office365/online-software.aspx

Our gaol at Taybridge Consulting is to keep you informed on technology and Office 365 has the potential to be a big player in the new Cloud Computing.