The Future of productivity - Office 365 walktrough and more

Since the official worldwide launch of the Microsoft productivity suite Office 365 by Kurt DelBene last October, there has been an enormous amound of information published on the web. Most of us saw some glimps of the product and its promising functionality, few of us had the privilige to experience its real power yet. Since Office 365 is not global available and only a 'few' countries are picked to do some beta for us.
Microsoft has published a paper with an overview of the functionality of the Office365 BETA.

So what things are changed since the predecessor BPOS and what does it mean for us?

That was yesterday
Office 365 is the succesor of BPOS. BPOS was the first released business productivity suite in the Online SKU. The suite included mail functionality with Exchange, a platform for storing and collaborating on information with SharePoint and communication with the OCS platform as most important components.
In Office 365 these functionalities are still there and are now based on the 2010 suites from the On-Premise SKU. This means that functionality is based on SharePoint Server 2010 and OCS is now called Lync Server.

High Fidelity of the Future of Productivity
Business Productivity is not only about storing, sharing and discussing about information, it is also about creating information with the usual means and in a familiar way. Leverage the skills already available and support optimizing these skills to produce information for the organization as a whole.
By adding Office Professional Plus to the online suite Microsoft lowered the differences in the user experience working Online or On-Premise.

So there you are. Four main functional online services for the end user, supporting Business Productivity.

The limitation of success
BPOS for me was a rather unexpected success due to the limitations of the suite. Well there are a lot of arguments to use the suite to support Business Productivity. The suite does deliver a competitive package of services in my opinion. Till now however the limitations will block the possibility to extend beyond the standard. So what did Microsoft to diminish these limitations and to seduce partners to use the suite more in the future?

Role based access and permissions
New to Office 365 is that this suite now realy is one suite of functionalities working together instead of a knotted together package of offerings. Access to Office 365 is now role based. Just one portal to all users and permissions based on the role. So an administrator has the functions available to manage the environment and a user can access his mail and accept a call or a task assigned to him.

Signing in
Office 365 has the abillity to use ADFS. This service provides a single signon access to the environment. No hassle with other user credentials and a lot better fit supporting business integration and security requirements.

Can I have one for my self?
Yes you can since Office365 is supporting the mysite which will give you a personal page. This page however is very more than just a personal siloed site to store some information. To support and encourage you to share, the user activity and the interests you indicate by rank a article or a document for instance, is collected and 'published' to your contacts. This means you will be helped with smart and fast access to the knowledge of the organization while looking for information based on your social distance and the relevance calculated through ranking, search results and so on. MySite will fullfill this information hub functionality.

Adding value
BPOS had this limitation which partner where quit disappointed with. The possibility to deliver their stuff on top of the Microsoft platform was not possible. You can extend BPOS but it is very limited. This has changed with Office 365. Why is this so important for the Microsoft Partner Network community and Microsoft too? The model Microsoft has chosen a long time ago is delivering functionality through partners. They add a huge amount of knowledge to the basic platforms and will be able to do so based on the On-Premise SKU as well as on the Online SKU.
Focus will be a requirement for the partners too. It will be difficult if not impossible to maintain a mixed business model in the long future.

From selling licences to providing business productivity services
Microsoft is aiming no longer on selling licences in the future. This change of business model is closely related to the move to the cloud. Claiming to be All In means also adjusting your supporting business model. Selling licences does not match with Cloud services. Cloud is NOT about technology or products at all, in my opinion. Providing services is another ball game and Microsoft is changing their relation with partner ànd consumer. Now today Microsoft is changing this partner and distribution model. Future focus will be on delivering these business productivity services in all aspects.


The Power to Think Big and Be Small, to Be Big and Act Fast
The standard edition of BPOS was limited to 30.000 users (I never had the pleasure to close a deal on that much users in a standard BPOS environment). This limitation is dropped. There is no max limit on the users. Being BIG is one thing, to be able to serve even the smallest organizations with the same top notch technology available for the big enterprise is something else. The minimal amount of users is dropped too! This means that everyone starting a business can use the functionality.
So are you going to have a webconference with your self? Well no, but are you doing business with your self?

I've embedded an video from the 2010 TechEd Europe session Office 365 walkthrough of David Anderson. You could watch and listen to this recording to get more insight than I cover in this Blog. (It is a recording from TechEd, so expect some Tech talk about administration and security and so on. Productivity in the eyes of David is the productivity of the IT Pro in first place)