What Is BPOS?

There has been a lot of talk at my company, and the wider IT community, recently about BPOS. I thought I would get some information together in quite a non-technical way which shows some of the financial and functional basics of BPOS, and also try to show what all the buzz is about.
For a start: BPOS stands for Business Productivity Online Suite. In real terms what this means is that a customer pays £6.71 per month for each user to access services which are actually hosted at Microsoft’s data centres. This means customers no longer have to have their own Exchange, SharePoint servers, OCS, or ISA servers, which saves considerable money when you factor in the ongoing support costs for looking after all the hardware and infrastructure even if they are all virtualised. The services supplied out of the box are:

Exchange Online Provide employees access to email, calendar, and contacts from virtually anywhere, at anytime, on desktops, laptops, and mobile devices—while helping to protect against malware and spam. Exchange Online can be rapidly deployed, flexibly expanded, and is designed to be securely administered using a powerful yet easy-to-use Web-based console. SharePoint Online Share documents, contacts, calendars, and tasks in a single location. Based on Microsoft Office SharePoint_® Server 2007, SharePoint Online delivers rich collaboration capabilities that enable team members to flexibly and efficiently collaborate, find organizational resources, search your intranet site, and manage content and workflow. Office Live Meeting Connect with colleagues and customers through real-time meetings, training sessions, and events using only a PC with an Internet connection. Hosted Web conferencing services from Microsoft Office Live Meeting give your employees the power to collaborate wherever they are, to set up project meetings, brainstorm ideas, and collaborate on whiteboards without the cost and hassle of travel! Office Communications Online Enable users to find and rapidly connect with the right person from the applications they use most. Office Communications Online provides streamlined access to rich presence and instant messaging capabilities that are centrally managed by IT and work seamlessly with a range of Microsoft Office system programs.

I have put together the diagram below to show how a customer’s data centre could look before and after implementing BPOS to detail all the costs associated with hosting these services and where savings might be made.
 

I hope that has helped with giving a brief overview of the key benefits from BPOS. Once more information is released about the changes with SharePoint 2010 and Exchange 2010 I will post again with the effect that this will have.
Thanks
John

Any costs or software license information shown should be taken to be merely indicative as required licenses and any subsequent costs are subject to Customer’s specific licensing model and needs.