Last week, I played answer guy to a couple of chats about Microsoft's clould services on two popular websites. I wasn't expecting a big crowd and was pleasantly surprised as they were well attended and there were a lot of great questions. Questions ranged from very general "what is SharePoint" to specific "can you migrate to Exchange Online using automated tools". I thought it would be good to post a few of the most common questions and answers here.
Q: What does BPOS stand for?
A: Business Productivity Online Suite - a set of services sold by Partners (and directly to customers) at https://mocp.microsoftonline.com that include SharePoint Online, Exchange Online, Live Meeting Online and Office Communications Online.
Q: Does SharePoint Online have a rich set of APIs we can use to integrate with our existing applications?
A: There are APIs you can use that allow you to interact with SharePoint Online using web services. This allows you to interact with the service to push and pull data, query contents, add list items, query calendars, etc. You cannot do everything you can do with SharePoint on-premise since SharePoint Online is a multi-tenant environment. See the SharePoint Online Developer's Guide for detailed guidance about what is in scope. Note there is also a
Exchange Online Developer's Guide.
Q: What is the average time it takes to migrate Exchange server mailboxes to exchange online for a company of 500
A: Depends on specifics regarding mailbox size and system complexity
(for example, do you on premise mail enabled devices or applications that require specific mail capabilities/ routing) but for a typical organization, you could easily do this over the weekend.
Q: Do you have tools that let me move existing users into Online?
A: Yes. You can use the free directory synchronization tool to automatically create all users for you from your AD.
Q: What are the pros and cons of having on premise vs in the cloud services?
A: On premise gives you complete control, access to lower level details like security logs (iis logs for example), server auditing events, and server level services such as enabling transports and transport rules. In addition, you can add custom software to the servers to suit your business requirements. You also need to invest in solutions for spam management, virus scanning, security maintenance, upgrades, backups and recovery. With Online, we manage the servers in our very high availability and secure multi-million dollar data center. You get to use the server features that provide the most benefit without the overhead of maintaining the on premise servers and associated technologies. Your ability to customize the service is more limited as we have to normalize usage In order to scale high and keep prices low. For many businesses, this is great opportunity to use enterprise class technologies in a highly available and secure environment at a low cost.
Q: We're a multinational organization what are the advantages for us? Especially on language support?
A: The services support multiple languages in all our portals and
supporting software. This is configurable on a per user basis directly in the browser. We have been continuously updating the languages supports. Also, support is available in different language. See the Microsoft.com/online FAQ
Q: What are the differences between the Online version of the servers and the on premise version?
A: The best place to get detailed information on this is the Service Descriptions. Go to this page http://www.microsoft.com/online/products.mspx and click on the service you are interested in. Then find the Service Description link. These have very useful information and are continuously updated.
All in all, these chats were really fun to do an points out there is a lot to learn about cloud services. A good place to start is Microsoft.com/online. And go get a free 30 day no obligation trial account at https://mocp.microsoftonline.com and see for yourself!