The Microsoft Cloud offering is more than just BPOS

The Microsoft Cloud offering is more than just BPOS

The heart of BPOS is SharePoint and Exchange but there’s more features in BPOS as well as other Cloud offerings from MS that provide great value to customers.

The following reflects the list of other technologies offered with BPOS and the value they add.

· Office Communicator (OCS)

o OCS delivers robust instant messaging (IM) and presence functionality that enables real-time person-to-person communication via text, voice and video within an organization. Through presence awareness, workers can quickly detect a colleague's availability for a time-sensitive consult or business-critical decision—and then connect rapidly using a reliable, security-enhanced IM solution. A free download of OCS 2007 R2 specifically designed for Office Communications Online can be obtained from a user’s My Company Portal site (https://home.microsoftonline.com) after they have successfully logged in.

· Office Live Meeting

o Microsoft’s hosted web conferencing tool is Live Meeting. With Live meeting you can connect with your colleagues and engage your customers through real-time meetings and training sessions. Features include:

§ Web client support for remote attendee flexibility.

§ Interactive application/desktop sharing and whiteboard tools.

§ Active speaker video switching, multi-party video and multi-party VoIP audio.

§ Rich-media presentations, native video conferencing and high-fidelity recording.

§ Training with event and class registration and virtual breakout rooms.

§ Integration with Outlook to schedule and send meetings to presenters and attendees.

§ Office Live meeting client applications can be downloaded from these links

· http://office.microsoft.com/en-us/help/HA101733831033.aspx

· http://office.microsoft.com/en-us/help/HA102368901033.aspx

· http://office.microsoft.com/en-us/live-meeting-help/download-the-recording-converter-for-microsoft-office-live-meeting-2007-HA010355066.aspx

Here are the other technologies that MS is offering as an online solution.

· Dynamics CRM Online

o MS Dynamics CRM Online delivers rich sales & marketing automation and service management functionality through your browser and everyday productivity applications such as Outlook. Find, keep, and grow customer relationships. Quickly centralize customer information and streamline business processes with a system that can be adapted to your unique business needs

o At the 2010 WPC conference MS announced that the next version of CRM (CRM 2011) would be publicly available as a beta release in September 2010, beginning with CRM Online. https://www.microsoft.com/presspass/press/2010/jul10/07-12wpcdynamicscrmpr.mspx

· Windows Azure

o Windows Azure™ is a cloud services operating system that serves as the development, service hosting and service management environment for the Azure platform. Windows Azure provides developers with on-demand compute and storage to host, scale, and manage web applications on the internet through Microsoft® datacenters.

o Windows Azure is a flexible platform that supports multiple languages and integrates with your existing on-premises environment. To build applications and services on Windows Azure, developers can use their existing Microsoft Visual Studio® expertise. In addition, Windows Azure supports popular standards and protocols including SOAP, REST, XML, and PHP.

· SQL Azure

o Microsoft® SQL Azure™ Database is a cloud-based relational database service built on SQL Server® technologies. It provides a highly available, scalable, multi-tenant database service hosted by Microsoft in the cloud. SQL Azure Database helps to ease provisioning and deployment of multiple databases. Developers do not have to install, setup, patch or manage any software. High availability and fault tolerance is built-in and no physical administration is required. SQL Azure Database supports Transact-SQL (T-SQL). Customers can use existing knowledge in T-SQL development and a familiar relational data model for symmetry with existing on-premises databases. SQL Azure Database can help reduce costs by integrating with existing toolsets and providing symmetry with on-premises and cloud databases.

· Exchange Hosted Services (EHS)

o EHS offers online tools to help your organization protect itself from spam and malware, satisfy retention requirements for e-discovery and compliance and encrypt data to preserve confidentiality.

· Intune (beta)

o Intune simplifies how businesses manage and secure PC’s using Windows cloud services and Windows 7 – so your computers and users can operate at peak performance from virtually anywhere.

o Intune cloud service can:

§ Manage updates

§ Protect PC’s from malware

§ Proactively monitor PC’s

§ Provide remote assistance

§ Track hardware and software inventory.

§ Set security policies

As you can see, MS has made a tremendous commitment to offering their products and technologies for the Cloud. This commitment will only continue in the future and continue to benefit their customers.

Note: some content for this post was obtained from. http://www.microsoft.com/online/products.mspx