BPOS became 'UNION' becomes Office365

Oct 19th 2010 Microsoft Unveiled the new name of their Microsoft Online proposition formely known as BPOS and codename 'UNION'. The new Name of the suite is Office365 and since the announcement a lot of content came available. Content about features, prices, markets, beta availability and roadmaps beyond.

Roadmap
The Beta came available for 13 countries/regions. These countries/regions include: Canada, France, Germany, Hong Kong SAR, Ireland, Italy, Japan, Mexico, Puerto Rico, Singapore, Spain, United Kingdom, and the United States. The Netherlands is not amoung the lucky ones, looking at the roadmap I think a safe bet is that it will be general available within 6 mounths.

Notice that the existing customers (BPOS) will have to wait a little longer until transitions of services are available.


Do you feel lucky?
Notice that the existing customers (BPOS) will have to wait a little longer until transitions of services are available. So are those new customers lucky or why are existing customers sorry they have to wait a little longer?

Microsoft explains these questions as follows:

Q: Is Office 365 still BPOS?
A: Office 365 is the introduction of new online services and capabilities, new user experiences, and new online platform capabilities related to the introduction of new underlying “2010” server software into Microsoft Online Services datacenters as well as other major new service and platform investments. The name may be new and includes new offerings, but you are subscribed to the same service – just significantly enhanced. It will just give you a lot more features and functionality once you make the transition.

Q: I am not on BPOS now. Should I wait for Office 365?
A: The benefits of Microsoft Online Services are realized as soon as services are deployed, whether on BPOS or Office 365. Customers who do decide to purchase BPOS now should deploy BPOS with the new system requirements to make the transition experience as smooth as possible.

So Microsoft explains that Office365 differs from BPOS and that all these benefits will be deployed when available. Even when you feel like going online, do it now, no need to wait...

I have no experience with the transition from BPOS to Office365, besides a few from Microsoft nobody has. Still I wonder if this is entirely thrue. There are some ´system requirements`?!?! and Microsoft has a Transition Checklist that looks quite straight forward.

The biggest defects of BPOS may be the biggest guarantee to successful transition.

BPOS ´defects´
BPOS is a productivity suite. In this package of functionality SharePoint plays a major role as it does in the on premise based functionality stack. In this package SharePoint online is based on the 2007 version also called MOSS. The biggest complaint from customers and even more the Microsoft Partner is that there are very limited options for customization available. The gap between the feature set available in the online version and MOSS2007 is huge.

Since the SharePoint2010 release last may became general available the differences between the two versions, made the demand to the release of BPOSv2 even bigger. SharePoint2010 is the 4th evolution of the platform. It's much more mature, but in relationship with SharePoint Online, it is developed with Online deployment as a starting point!

Since the MOSS2007 was not, Microsoft had a lot of problems deploying BPOS in a shared cloud environment (multi-tenant). So what is the effect of this mindshift to the cloud?

Office365
Office365 looks promising in this area. A lot not all features are available or are expected to become available shortly in the SharePoint Online version.

The feature set available to the end-user became very rich. Nice integration with the Office Webapps, full fidelity across devices, real WIKI everywhere and so on and on. Again more important is that the Microsoft Partner finally will be able to deploy their added value solutions on top of the platform.

The starting point to develop the platform with a multi-tenant cloud for the SharePoint2010 platform (and all other 'members' of WAVE14) changed the way resources are are used and managed. Simply said, a buggy application of one company cannot hurt another, not even when they are deployed in the same infrastructure.

Management capabilities are also available to administrators in SharePoint2010 Online. This 'feature' was just very limited available to the Microsoft Partner in BPOS.