Wednesday, November 3, 2010

More on Microsoft Cloud Services - BPOS

Okay, so right after I published the last article on Microsoft Cloud services, it suddenly dawned on me, “What about BPOS?”. What on earth is BPOS you ask? BPOS stands for Business Productivity Online Standard Suite. My CMIT colleague Debbie Bush has been making comments about BPOS for a while now (she is on the Microsoft IT Advisory Council and she is sooooo pro Microsoft). I had taken a look after the umpteenth comment she made about a year ago, just the jist that this was Microsoft’s cloud offering for Office products and left it at that. I just couldn’t see the need for dealing with a web based Office suite since I felt it couldn’t be as responsive as working with a desktop package.

So I Googled (yes I prefer Google search not Bing) BPOS Microsoft and the first entry on the list brought me to the MS BPOS area. I quickly realized I had been wrong about BPOS, it’s not the cloud version of Office, it’s the Cloud version of a few other MS products, namely Exchange (e-mail and such aka Outlook), Sharepoint (document management and collaboration), “Communications Online” (aka instant messaging) and Live Meeting (web conferencing). Cool.

To help you understand this in more depth, I’ve added links to videos, web pages and documents that provide more detail.

Want to know if this is the right for your small business, just give me a call.

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