The 13th of April me and my collegue took a plane to Seattle. We planned our trip back to The Netherlands on the 18th. Well... The volcano 'Eyjafjallajökull' on Iceland changed the plans of a lot of people depending on the 'Cloud'. It took us some extra days to get back to Europe.
Cloud was the theme of the Microsoft Excecutive Briefing. Azure and BPOS. These developments at Microsoft are huge. Major investments in this area. Checkout the -We're All In- statement of Microsoft CEO Steve Balmer at his keynote at the University of Washington.
During this briefing the latest developments were unveiled. We had the opportunity to take a look at the investments in datacenters all over the world. More important is the evolution in the way the datacenters are build, a different level of utilizing 'flexponsive' computing and storage.
This is the layer 'Azure' is build on. Eventualy most of Microsofts products will be ported to this platform in the cloud. At this moment BPOS is not yet build on the Azure platform.
BPOS (Business Productivity Online Suite) is the name of the suite that includes Exchange Online, SharePoint Online, Office Live Meeting and Office Communications Online. This package with this terrible name has been given the code name 'Union' and will be rebranded. Expect this to happen at the WPC10 (Microsoft Worldpartner Conference) in Washington DC July this year.
The functionality set of Union is much, much more comprehensive than the functionality available now in BPOS. The first step is the launch of all wave14 developments (Exchange2010, Office2010, SharePoint2010 etc). One of the biggest complaints in the market (partners and customers) was the problem that the SharePoint part of BPOS lacked the possibility to be customized. Well you have some possibility's to make changes, but no custom code in the multi tennant BPOS environment. A single tennant environment (dedicated version) is available from 5000 seats. This is all going to change.
The pricing per seat per month has been changed since the introduction about a year ago. In the Netherlands you can have the functionality of a total set for just €8,52 pppm. So you get a Mailserver; a collaboration site where you can store your documents, share information etc; one can setup online conversations and even choose to do so if a person appears to be available (presence). Think of the infrastructure needed to build and maintain this in your own datacenter!
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