Microsoft BPOS Updates for November

Microsoft are constantly improving BPOS and adding new features each month, and November is no different.

Mailbox Access Permissions

Powershell commandlets are being added to increase the range of mailbox permission settings that can be done by BPOS administrators including:

• Full Mailbox Access
• Delegate Send As
• Send On Behalf

These provide capabilities including:

“up shared mailboxes, granting “send as” permissions for administrative assistants, and enabling full mailbox access for third party applications, such as archiving applications and fax servers”

No more opening a ticket with support!

The CMDlets are:

Add Mail Permission

Remove Mail Permission

These will require an update to the Transporter/Migration tools which will be downloadable from MS Download Centre once the update is deployed across all datacenters; this should be completed by early December.

Bulk User Management

A new set of CMDlets for bulk adding and removing users have been added too. These will also rely on the updated Transporter tool being made available. The CMDlets are:

• · Add-MSOnlineUser
• · Set-MSOnlineUser
• · Remove-MSOnlineUser
• · Get-MSOnlineUser

Sharepoint Auditing

Admins will soon be able to view data and reports on site collection activities including:

• items added
• changes to permissions
• documents viewed

Having access to this information can help track the utilisation of the Sharepoint investment within the company and so will be very useful. Companies will be able to see how users are interacting with the system and identify any areas that need improving or conversely, which areas are a roaring success

Partners on Invoices

Customers who use a Partner of Record will soon see that partner named on their invoices. From a Partner’s point of view, this is a great addition as it helps solidify the relationship between the Partner and the customer and reduces any confusion as to points of contact for support etc.

Once again, the updates have given BPOS an even stronger message and this, coupled with this week’s price cuts, should definitely see an increase in BPOS takeup.

The full MS Online blog post is here.

Microsoft BPOS New Features – August 2009

August sees yet more additions to the feature list of Microsoft Exchange Online-helping make it an even better choice for customers. This month sees:

SMTP Relay: This allows SMTP enabled applications to send emails via Exchange Online. I’ve been asked about this a few times now so it’s good to be able to say “yes”

Journaling: Exchange Online emails can now be journaled, both to Exchange Hosted Archiving and other 3rd party solutions*. Journaling can be turned on by contact Support and opening a service request.

*It’s worth noting that MS do not support or certify any of the 3rd party offerings.

The MS Online blog can be found here.

Microsoft BPOS Partner features

Already this year’s Microsoft Worldwide Partner Conference (WPC) is seeing great announcements and, if my time conversion is right it only started no more th an 1 hour ago!

These first announcements are around Microsoft BPOS and primarily concern MS Partners who resell Microsoft’s Online Services.

Partner Order on Behalf Of: This is a feature that I and pretty much every other BPOS partner has been waiting for; the ability to place BPOS orders on behalf of our customers. The current model of sending the customer off to purchase online themselves is quite alien to how this is usually done and can lead to confusion all around. Being able to order ourselves makes it easier for partners to be truly Value Added Resellers.

“..The feature allows partners to initiate trials, specify the services and quantities they recommend for their customers, pre-configure orders for their customers to complete..”

Partner Commerce Dashboard: This is again a great addition for Partners. This gives a consolidated view of the status of trials and orders for all the partner’s customers. The data can be exported to CRM systems via Excel too.

They have also announced that Delegated Administration to Partners will be available by (Oct-Dec) Q4 2009. This means that customers will be able to let their Value Add Reseller (VAR) perform certain tasks on their behalf, this again fits in better with the current model a lot of Partners/Customers have.

Original post over on the MS Online team blog here.

Microsoft BPOS available from Monday!

The much hyped, very exciting Microsoft Online Services will be available to order via the MOCP (Microsoft Online Customer Portal) from Monday 27/04/09!

Find more Microsoft Online here:

http://richfrombechtle.wordpress.com/ms-onlinebpos/

Microsoft Online/BPOS Guide

I’ve been working with Microsoft for months on BPOS, their Software Plus Services offering and getting the word out to customers etc…helping them align their business decisions with MS Online and more. I think that MS Online Services are excellent and will be a real game changer-allowing end users to increase profitability while simultaneously reducing costs and streamlining processes…what more could you want?!

I’ve put together a guide to MS Online Services (collectively called BPOS) over at:

http://richfrombechtle.wordpress.com/ms-onlinebpos/

which should answer most questions you might have. I’m constantly updating it as I discover/remember more info but please feel free to leave a comment if you’re question hasn’t been answered.

Sharepoint Online & Groove

This week I ‘ave been mostly…using Groove.

Groove has been the one bit of MS technology that I’ve never taken a look at before and I’ve always thought it was a bit pointless…but not anymore! Now I think it’s awesome and perhaps the best product they’ve got, alongside Sharepoint. I’ve had it installed for years as part of Office ‘07 but I have literally never opened it up until this week. The thing that prompted me was this post here over on Dutch Technet about using it with Sharepoint Online and as MS Online is my big thing-I figured it was worth investigating.

Groove is essentially a collaboration tool that let’s you create “workspaces” and then invite co-workers and/or external people to join; you can then share and edit files, chat via IM, track issues, play chess (!) and more-all with a minimum amount of effort. As an example, I’ve created a MS Online/BPOS workspace and have invited the various people involved @ MS-this way we can share info, ask questions and keep updated much easier than simply via email.

The Technet post revealed to me that you can link Groove to Sharepoint and thus share files from your site collections without the hassle/cost of giving users direct access to Sharepoint…even better, you can do this with Sharepoint Online too!

Microsoft BPOS Trials available

After Monday’s Cebit announcement, the customer trials of MS Online (BPOS) are now available here. You can also see the pricing too…

Here you can choose to trial Exchange Online, Sharepoint Online, Live Meeting Online or the complete BPOS suite (including Office Communications Server Online).

The trial is up to a maximum of 20 users and will run until General Availability (sometime in April) and then a further 30 days. If you choose to turn it live and purchase subscription, the systems will simply carry on working so you won’t have to reconfigure anything

At £10.04 per user per month for the entire suite, MS Online can really help business increase productivity and cut costs at the same time…go check it out!

Comparison of Sharepoint Server & Sharepoint Online

While Sharepoint Online is an excellent product and fits the bill nicely for the vast majority of customers, there are certain features it lacks when compared to it’s regular on-premise brethren; this is mainly down to the multi-tenant environment of the standard datacenters.

Green = Sharepoint Online Blue = On Premise Server Only

As you can see, the Search & Business Intelligence sections are practically non-existent online which may put some people off. However if you need those features then you can utilise MS Online in it’s full Software PLUS Services mode and have an online AND an on-premise server together. It will be interesting to see if Sharepoint Online features more Search & BI functionality once “Wave 14″ hits as Sharepoint On-Premise will have a whole raft of new features in these areas…

Microsoft state:

In the current release of the services, the following actions are not supported:

·         Use inline code, build coded workflows, or develop Office InfoPath forms with coded business logic.

·         Deploy features, solutions, pluggable authentication providers, Web Parts, site definitions, or other modifications that require deployment and configuration on the server.

·         Modify built-in SharePoint files, web.config settings, security policy, and other elements.

·         Make configuration changes that affect the Web server or the Microsoft .NET Framework.

·         Make changes or add capabilities that require a custom database or changes to the database schema.

Microsoft BPOS Trials Announced

Today at Cebit, Microsoft announced the availability of trials of their Online Services-BPOS (Business Productivity Online Suite) in 19 countries (Austria, Belgium, Canada, Denmark, Finland, France, Germany, Ireland, Italy, Japan, Netherlands, New Zealand, Norway, Portugal, Spain, Sweden, Switzerland, the United Kingdom). This follows on from the US launch in November 2008.

BPOS is an online offering of some of Microsoft’s most popular software including Exchange Online, Sharepoint Online, Live Meeting Online and Office Communications Server Online, and it is something I am very excited about.

As a Microsoft Partner I envision that Microsoft Online Services will help more customers access the benefits of these MS technologies, particularly the smaller customers as they will benefit greatly from the lower costs, reduced/removed hardware and management costs and the ease of implementation. Having said that these are all attractive benefits to even the largest customer who can use them to increase productivity and reduce costs, something which is even more important in today’s economic climate!

A great example of this is the case study that MS released today of their work with GlaxoSmithKline and their adoption of MS Online Services. GSK are migrating 100,000 users from Lotus Notes over to MS Exchange Online with a number of users taking the “Deskless Worker SKU”-a new product that gives limited access to Exchange and/or Sharepoint for users who don’t need full access and is thus available at a reduced cost:

“The move to Microsoft Online Services will help GlaxoSmithKline cut operational costs by an estimated 30 percent and create a variable cost model that will provide increased flexibility in the future,” said Ingo Elfering, vice president of Information Technology Strategy, GlaxoSmithKline.

A blog post by GSK about why they swapped to BPOS can be found over at the MS Online Blog here. A great Q&A with the GSK CIO can be found here.

On a personal note, I’ve been trialling BPOS at work for a few months now and it is absolutely fantastic. It gives me a lot more freedom that a standard premise based solution as well as cutting down on hassle such as VPN clients etc. We’ve had great success talking to our customers about it and I think we, as an industry, will see a great take up of this new way to consume MS technology.

Microsoft BPOS-A first hand look

Today I was finally able to set up our test account for Microsoft BPOS and it was definitely worth the wait. I’ve not been playing around with it for long but already I’m highly impressed with the amount of features and how easy it is to use. All the most common options you will need, such as create site, add user, increase storage are contained in easy access menus and are pretty much exactly where you’d expect them to be

Within 5 minutes I’d added users to the system, created a new Sharepoint Site Collection and then added said users to the Sharepoint site…and I’m no Sharepoint Administrator! I then proceeded to add multiple documents to the Sharepoint site which was easy and very quick-just as quick as an on-premise solution as far as I can tell.

There are some things missing such as Excel Services, forms etc as well as the ability to run custom code, so it won’t fit everyone-but on the whole it covers what people need very well.

Moving on to Exchange, I’ve just signed in to OWA and without having to do any configuration either as a user or admin (other than setting the size of the mailbox), I’m up and running and firing emails off all over the show  

For business that want to run BPOS alongside their existing on-premise installations, it is very simple synchronize your Active Directory (AD) and/or Exchange Global Address Lists as well as migrating existing mailboxes across to Microsoft Exchange Online. These are all done via wizards and having seem them demonstrated at TVP, they’re pretty simple to use.

I’m very impressed with the user interface and the general “flow” of the entire BPOS suite site, from the perspective of both an admin and a user. My gallery of screenshots can be found here.

I want to thank Hugh Mcleod and Steve Clayton for this great S+S diagram!