Notes from the Cloud: Oct. 6
Notes from the Cloud is a new series for the Microsoft Online Services Team Blog bringing you a summary of news and blog posts related to Microsoft Online Services, cloud computing, and our competitors published by partners, blog writers, and news sources across our online community.
· From Redmond Channel Partner Online, Stephen Swoyer writes Making the Most of BPOS, a profile of PointBridge, a Chicago-based Microsoft Online Services Partner and the 2009 Microsoft Online Services Partner of the Year.
· With the SharePoint Conference set for Oct. 19-22 in Las Vegas, Jeff Teper, Corporate Vice President, SharePoint Server, looks at the history of SharePoint and provides an interesting retrospective on Microsoft’s collaboration standard bearer, including this hat tip to Microsoft Online Services:
Based on the SharePoint 2007 codebase, we released both a Dedicated (single tenant) version of SharePoint Online as well as a Standard (multi-tenant) version of SharePoint Online. This is all part of our Business Productivity Online Suite including SharePoint Online, Exchange Online, Office Communications Online and Live Meeting. The response to both the dedicated and multi-tenant offering has been outstanding. Customers have told us they like getting access to the most comprehensive and flexible set of collaboration and communication tools with the reliability, security and manageability they need.
· The editors at Computerworld give their opinion on the Technical Preview of Microsoft Office Web Apps, important work that our colleagues on the Office team are doing to move these powerful productivity applications to the cloud.
· The University System of Ohio and Microsoft announced an Education Alliance Agreement that will bring cloud-based messaging and collaboration solutions, including Exchange Online, to Ohio’s higher education and K-12 communities. Ohio Board of Regents Chancellor Eric D. Fingerhut is quoted in the announcement:
"The Education Alliance Agreement provides the University System of Ohio with major cost savings for messaging and collaboration products," said Chancellor Fingerhut. "This agreement advances Ohio's 10-year Strategic Plan for Higher Education by supporting a common technology infrastructure through collaboration and group purchasing, which makes the University System of Ohio more efficient."
· ZDNet’s Mary-Jo Foley does some oranges-to-oranges comparison by measuring the Microsoft Online Services Deskless Worker Suite against IBM's LotusLive iNotes. Mary-Jo notes that most analysts are comparing LotusLive iNotes to Google Apps:
IBM’s announcement of a new hosted entry-level communications offering has led to lots of punditry around how it compares to Google Apps. But I’m not sure that’s IBM’s main competition here.
· In his post SharePoint in the Cloud – A Real World Experience Using BPOS, Philip Plimmer, at New Zealand-based partner Intergen, writes about recommending SharePoint Online for an organization needing a collaboration solution that extends to partners and potential partners. Philip provides this explanation of BPOS and cloud computing:
The BPOS solution is one of a growing number of “cloud” services – that huge cloud of connected servers called the Internet. Your system is not running in your corporate data centre – it just lives out there in the cloud. In a way cloud computing is nothing different to what you already do if you have a personal email account such as Windows Live Hotmail or Google’s Gmail.
The big difference is instead of talking about personal email, we are now taking the corporate data centre to the cloud.
We want to hear more stories like Philip’s. Do you have a real world BPOS story to tell? Share it with us.
