On Thursday, I went to a Microsoft TTT course about BPOS in Schiphol, The Netherlands. The abbreviation TTT stands for “train the trainer”. It’s basically a course that tells you how to deliver the training yourself and as such it is targeted to Microsoft partners.

Microsoft BPOS or Business Productivity Online Suite is a collection of hosted services for customers that do not want to implement them on-premise. BPOS should be available for purchase in the United States in November. In Europe, the target date for general availability is the first half of 2009.

BPOS is available in several versions but the course only covered the standard version. The standard version basically uses a shared model and as such does not allow for a lot of customizations. 

The following services were covered in the course:

  • Microsoft Exchange Online (including Microsoft Exchange Hosted Filtering)
  • Microsoft Office SharePoint Online
  • Microsoft Office LiveMeeting

The course did not cover Office Communications Online.

Let’s take a brief look at the services in the following sections. Note that I am writing here about the standard version of BPOS.

Microsoft Exchange Online
This service provides Exchange Server 2007 functionality to users. By default, every user gets a 1GB mailbox that they can access with Outlook 2007, Outlook Web Access or a mobile device that can handle Server ActiveSync (Windows Mobile, iPhone, …). Extra storage can be purchased at a relatively low price. The end-user functionality is the same as with regular on-premise Exchange because the same server and client software is used.

From an administration point of view however, Microsoft Exchange Online provides only basic features. As an administrator you can create contacts, distribution lists and rooms. You can configure multiple domain names and set one domain as the default. When you add domain names, you just need to modify your MX records in order to send all mail to Microsoft’s hosted filtering servers.

I should note here that it is possible to split your users in online users and on-premise users. This is handy in a transitioning scenario where you slowly move users to the cloud. To make this scenario work, Microsoft provides a synchronization tool and a mailbox migration tool. In this scenario, your mail should still go to your on-premise servers. Those servers will then process all mails and forward mails to online users if needed. Although this scenario provides mail routing coexistence, it does not provide free/busy time synchronization making the planning of meetings with online and on-premise users a hassle.

You cannot configure things such as ActiveSync policies, journal rules, transport rules, Send As and many others because these settings are not exposed in the management interface or are (for now) difficult to implement in a shared environment.

Microsoft Office SharePoint Online
This service provides MOSS 2007 (Microsoft Office SharePoint Server) functionality to users. Indeed, Microsoft uses MOSS instead of WSS but they do not expose the full set of features to users and administrators. You can create sites and everything else you create in a site such as document libraries and lists. You can customize the site using SharePoint Designer. You can, for example, create workflows with SharePoint Designer or add a data view web part. Note that customizations cannot include custom code. Interestingly, browser-based InfoPath forms are not supported. However, you can create and use InfoPath forms with the InfoPath client.

Note that today it is not possible to access SharePoint sites using a custom domain name. So something like https://sales.contonso.com is not possible. Instead, you need to access sites using the URL provided by Microsoft. Luckily, the sites you have access to are listed on the user’s home page. The user can access the home page using https://home.microsoftonline.com. Click the picture below to see a screenshot of the home page.

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Microsoft Office LiveMeeting
The LiveMeeting service in BPOS is basically the same as the existing LiveMeeting online service. In fact, BPOS uses the same infrastructure. All users that are enabled in the BPOS management console can initiate a LiveMeeting session with up to 15 people. This is different from the full Microsoft Office LiveMeeting Online offering where a session can have over a 1000 people.

Conclusion
BPOS standard is an easy way to provide your users with an e-mail account and collaboration services without having to invest in infrastructure components such as servers and storage. The management is extremely simple when compared to the full on-premise solutions but you also have less features especially for SharePoint.