Just a quick post to cover the fact that the Exchange Online Extra Storage SKU (TRA-00018 ) for BPOS is being discontinued.
The default mailbox size is being increased from 5GB to 25GB and, as this is the maximum storage a user can have, there’s simply no need to have the extra storage SKU.
I was asked a great question via the comments on my blog, which was:
“Can BPOS accept journal data that has been exported from an existing Exchange system?”
With some help from the great people in the Worldwide BPOS teams at Microsoft I have an answer…and that answer is YES 
It is possible to import already journaled data into Exchange Online, meaning you can easily move from Exchange Onsite to Exchange Online.
This one is a little bit odd-I assume the reason you can’t transfer the data online is due to the sheer volume of data that may well be in question and so “sneakernetting” it would be quicker; but couldn’t DVD’s be used? I suppose that an External HD would mean the data could all be read in without any human intervention along the way, while a bunch of DVD’s would require someone to insert/eject them? (Feel free to add your thoughts).
You need to create a “mapping” file which for Exchange 2000, 2003 & 2007 can be done via:
1.Start a command prompt. (Click Start, click Run, type Cmd, and then click OK.)
2. At the command prompt, type or copy and paste the following and press enter:
C:\> csvde -l “mail,legacyExchangeDN” -r “(objectClass=user)” -f customer_name-map-file.csv
For Exchange 5.5:
1. Open the Microsoft® Exchange Server 5.5 administrative program and choose the option for a tools-directory export.
Historical Data File Format and Submission Procedures Microsoft Exchange Server
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2. There will be an option to choose mailboxes, custom recipients, and distribution lists (select all).
3. Select the export file option and choose a destination for the file you are about to create. The file that is exported will be in a CSV format.
Please remember to include this file with your historical data. The file should be named: customer_name-map-file.csv
Once you have all that it’s loaded onto your External drive/USB stick, you need to package it up and physically mail it off to Microsoft with the following details:
Bulk Data Services Group
Attn: Betti Johnson (Ticket Number)
Alias: bettijo
3720 159th Ave NE
Redmond, WA 98052
Ph. 1 (425) 703-3237
I am checking to see if there is a separate address for EMEA (and indeed other regions) and also how much this service costs, as the pdf datasheet hints at a charge. *Update* I’ve just been told that the charge is $50 per GB (one time fee) for the import and that you must send the data to the US.
The datasheet can be found here.
It’s now possible to serve SMTP clients via Exchange Online-meaning you can have mail originating outside the online environment. I’ve had a few people ask me about this and the use has always been so that automated applications can send mail via Exchange Online…such as an SQL server auto sending a report etc.
To connect the SMTP client to Exchange Online you’ll need to give it the Fully Qualified Domain Name (FQDN) which will be:
You’ll also need to use Port 587 and TLS (Transport Layer Security).
Full info can be found over at the Technet BPOSitive blog.
Yet another great new feature that serves to make Exchange Online and BPOS a great choice for companies of all kinds & sizes…
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.
As previous visitors will probably have noticed, I’m quite a fan of Microsoft’s Online Services AKA Business Productivity Online Suite (BPOS). I spend a fair amount of my time talking to customers about how they can online services to better serve their business and how BPOS can fit their needs.
Something that everyone needs to be aware of is that the online versions of the products aren’t quite as fully featured as their regular, on-site relatives. This means there can be certain situations where the MS hosted version just isn’t a viable option…however MS are constantly working to give them parity with the on-site versions, but it takes time transferring them into a multi-tenant environment. Exchange Online is very nearly feature complete but the biggest missing feature is Public Folders…
What are Public Folders?
“Public folders provide an effective way to collect, organize, and share information with others in your organization. They are central, shared folders that anyone can view to share information and ideas. Public folders can contain any Outlook item type, such as messages, appointments, contacts, tasks, journal entries, notes, forms, files, and posts.”
We use them at work for a number of purposes but once common use is as a repository for licence certificates, agreement details etc that can be accessed by the software team, sales account managers, customers services dept etc-without there being any duplication. Different people have different permissions so us in the software team have full permissions while others have just read only access. Sure, we could do this with Sharepoint (and for some things we do) but as these documents are all emailed-it is, at the minute, easier to keep them within Outlook.
A good guide to Public Folders can be found here.
Other things that aren’t technically Public Folders tasks but are inextricably linked are:
E-Mail Delegates: Delegate access to your mailbox to another individual, or delegate access to particular data with particular privileges. For example, allow an administrative assistant to accept or create calendar appointments on behalf of a manager.
Send As: Allow someone else to send mail from your mailbox. Your name will appear on the sent from line. For example, allow an administrator to send e-mail as a user (not on behalf of).
Shared Mailbox: Provide a group of people common access to a specific mailbox. For example, allow a single support alias to be monitored by multiple users.
Up until a few days ago-these were all impossible to do with Exchange online and that was often a stumbling block in discussions with customers. As the beginning of that sentence suggests-this has now changed
I was speaking to a customer last week who was looking for the Shared Mailbox functionality and, after a call with MS, I was able to determine that this feature will become available “this quarter” so by the end of September. This made the customer very happy
Shared mailboxes and email delegates will be available as standard functionality whereas Send As will need to be enabled via a Support escalation request.
A great whitepaper on Public Folders and BPOS can be found here.
Exchange Online & Sharepoint Online:
While the lack of Public Folders can at first, seem like a big hurdle to adopting BPOS-in many cases using Sharepoint Online instead is as good if not better!
Exchange public folders are frequently used to set up calendars, task lists, and contact lists for team or company-wide collaboration. People with appropriate permissions are able to view and edit the lists.
While the Shared Mailbox feature is the traditional way of doing this and, for many people, will continue to be-it can also be done with Sharepoint Online:
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There are many different ways of using Sharepoint Online as a replacement for Exchange Public Folders which are covered in the whitepaper here.
I’ve been working with MS Online (BPOS) for quite some months but it’s only now, with more and more customers looking into it for their environments that we’re seeing the odd little questions etc we didn’t anticipate.
This is one that came up today and, while it might be obvious to some of you, it probably won’t to others
BPOS provides users with a Single Sign On (SSO) client that logs them into the online services when they log into Windows, thus removing the need for repeated entering of credentials. If you right click the SSO icon in the System tray-it will launch you right into the app…unless it’s Outlook Web Access. When you try and run OWA, it requires you to enter your username and password each time; the reasoning behind it is a lack of pass-through authorization for increased security.
The upshot is…if you use Exchange Online but don’t have Outlook-you can’t use the Single Sign On to access your email. Maybe not the most common request but I’ve already have it once so you never know 
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.
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 Online Services are getting ever closer to being a reality in the corporate world, with the official US launch on Monday (17-11-08). The UK launch will follow in the Spring so around March/April 2009.
The first acronym was SAAS or “Software-As-A-Service” with perhaps the biggest example being Salesforce.com, the CRM system. This is an online only model where the customer doesn’t have anything “on-premise” (installed at the customer site) and instead it is all in the “Cloud” (the internet). Microsoft realised that that doesn’t always suit all customers..they often like to have at least some portion of the software installed on-premise too, be it for Disaster Recovery, integration with other existing systems, high levels of customization and many other reasons so they invented Software+Services. The “Plus” is the key..customers can have the software on premise, in the cloud or a mix of both giving them a greater level of flexibility.
Microsoft Online Services AKA BPOS (Business Productivity Online Suite) provides corporate users with Microsoft hosted versions of the software, accessed via the internet. The products included in the BPOS Suite are:
*It’s to be noted that OCS isn’t available as yet and will be making an appearance a little while into 2009.
Mary Jo Foley has a new post with info on future S+S offerings from Microsoft. Their stated aim is to have a web-based service to match all their exisitng on-premise offerings and it looks like ForeFront Security and System Center Management tools are the next in the line up. This would likely encompass anti-virus, web/content filtering, firewalls, online backup, disaster recovery and more-quite a good string to their bow.
Some people might wonder what the point of this is and while there are many reasons that customers will looks at BPOS, here are what I see as the 2 key drivers.
The Small to Medium Business (SMB’s)
I first took a real look at BPOS over at the WPC in Houston and right away I could see the potential for SMB’s. These are customers typically around the 50-100 user mark (although they could be smaller/bigger) who love the features of (usually) Sharepoint server and can see that collaboration, enhanced search, wiki’s, portals and more would benefit their business by increasing efficiency. However, they often can’t afford the initial monetary outlay for Sharepoint and/or don’t have the people to deploy, configure and maintain a Sharepoint installation.
Typically this brings an end to the matter until the customer increases in size to make the internal administration do-able or they find a chunk of cash down the back of the sofa 
BPOS however, will be a perfect solution as it can resolve both the afore mentioned issues.
Because BPOS is hosted at Microsoft’s DataCenters in The Cloud, the customer doesn’t need to worry about learning the skills to deploy and configure the software at installation, ensuring they have the people and time to perform ongoing maintenance, deploying updates & patches-Microsoft will take care of all that.
Because BPOS is charged on a monthly basis, this allows customers to spread the costs over the course of the 12 months, rather than paying it all in one hit up-front.
The Busy Corporate
In some ways this is similar to the first example but it applies to bigger companies. Most corporates around the 300+ user mark have a very long to-do list..upgrade network switching, implement SAN (Storage Area Network), desktop refresh, move to a virtual infrastructure and so on. Added into/onto a list like this, deploying something such as Sharepoint or Office Communications Server can seem a daunting, perhaps impossible task to system admins. They’ll need to purchase and deploy new servers, perhaps upgrade parts of the network to cope with the increased demand, add extra security and plenty more which can mean that the timescales for deployments such as this are quite lengthy and keep growing.
BPOS can cut through all that. The busy admins don’t need to do anything other than grant users access to the services. As they don’t need to deploy, upgrade or install anything-the implementation timescales can be drastically reduced, which is good for all involved.
BPOS will allow companies to realise the many benefits that these Microsoft products can offer them much quicker than is currently possible.
Although the BPOS suite includes all the mentioned products, they are also available individually which gives customers the flexibility to have, for example, an on-premise Exchange server with a Cloud based Sharepoint server. Alternatively you can have the same product both on-premise and online so a big corporate HQ could have Exchange onsite, while their satellite offices could use the MS hosted version.
As for the licensing side of things, I do have some info. Customers that have current Software Assurance (SA) will be able to purchase the services at a reduced cost to reflect their already increased investment in MS technology, and they will need to keep their SA current alongside their BPOS licensing. This means should they choose to move away from BPOS at a later date, they will still be fully licensed for the most current perpetual versions of the software too. Customers that don’t have SA will have to purchase a User Subscription Licence (USL) to gain access to the BPOS suite. Should they choose to revert back to soley on-premise software, they won’t retain any entitlement to the software (as it is a non-perpetual subscription).
Many people view S+S as a bit of a black art or perhaps a fad but I really think this is a watershed moment for anyone that uses software. The companies that embrace Software+Services from the start, be they MS partners or end users, will really have an advantage over their competitors in the long run. As a Microsoft Gold Partner I’m very excited about the new things that BPOS will bring along
*Update* I heard today direct from Microsoft that Dynamics CRM will be available as an online version in July 2010, so a little while yet.
If you have any questions or comments about moving to a Microsoft hosted solution, please feel free to leave a comment and I’ll help you out as best I can!
Cheers
Rich
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