BPOS goes live internationally, with updates and OCS to follow
The announcement is out that BPOS is available in several countries.
There has been a ton of working on here to roll out these services as fast as possible to countries worldwide. As this is a new service for Microsoft, there has been a learning curve on the various requirement and regulations involved for each individual country and they are quite different, making it a challenge to offer a single, unified set of services to the world. However, merely difficult is not an issue for the challenges we tackle and the services are now available in 19 countries.
From the press release "Exchange Online and SharePoint Online are available for trial in Austria, Belgium, Canada, Denmark, Finland, France, Germany, Ireland, Italy, Japan, Netherlands, New Zealand, Norway, Portugal, Spain, Sweden, Switzerland, the United Kingdom and the United States. Organizations worldwide will be able to trial and purchase the entire Business Productivity Online Suite, including Office Communications Online, in April."
Note that OCS is not yet turned on but will be in April for both US and International customers. There are some other updates to the services as well that generally do not impact the user but a couple of key ones that do are : a) the portals are available in 7 languages and b) the Single Sign on Tool now runs on all supported client operating systems other than Media Center and XP Home!
Stay tuned for more details on the delta in the services update.
