Migration to BPOS – Initial thoughts
Having completed the migration to Microsoft Business Productivity Online Suite (BPOS) on Christmas Eve, I thought it would be useful to post a few comments on how it has worked out in the first few weeks. I’ll start with a few of the disappointments first and then move on to the things that I have liked.
Disappointments
My biggest disappointment has to be with Office Communicator 2007 R2.
Unable to do Video or Voice calls
With Office Communicator you cannot do Voice or Video calls unless all of the machines in the call are on the same LAN! Really this is a major fail for something that is supposed to be cloud based – I mean you can do this in Messenger with no problem.
Also the Communicator Client continues to report an error stating that Communicator cannot determine the Exchange Web Services – so it won’t be able to automatically report if you are in a meeting or out of the office.
Effectively this makes Office Communicator almost useless as it offers less functionality than that provided by Messenger or Skype.
No Links
I also find the policy of blocking any URLs to be a bit over the top, they should provide a user defined option to allow or not rather than completely block them. Having to revert to Email to send a reference link mid conversation is really silly.
A better way solution?
I have looked for a beta of Communicator 2010 to see if this will solve the problem, but it appears that there is little or no information out there on this.
Having migrated from an Exchange only Environment the failings of Communicator are a disappointment, but there are a number of other benefits to BPOS that do make it worth the move.
Things I Liked
Single Sign-On
The single sign on client, that also configures you applications, has to be one of the best features. The ability to be able to have automatic sign on to your applications regardless of where you are is brilliant. And the fact the sign-on client now also works on the Mac is a real bonus to those that have a mixed environment.
SharePoint
As you may be aware I am a big fan of SharePoint, I have always looked at affordable ways to get a hosted solution but have found the costs to be very high with minimal storage space. With the BPOS account you get to create a number of SharePoint site collections (all WSS based) and can allocate storage space as needed. During the trial you get 5GB (20 users x 0.25GB) although not a significant amount should allow you to use it as a collaboration platform.
The biggest limitation with SharePoint is the core platform and the ability to customise this, in 2010 things will be much better with the introduction of the Sandboxed solutions – but there are some great examples of doing ‘code-less’ deployments today, look at what the guys at Zeven Seas have done with ProduShare.
Live Meeting
Having failed to get video and voice going with Communicator we tried using LiveMeeting as an alternative, sure it is perhaps a little over the top for a quick conf call – but actually we found it to be very useful. I think when communicator is working right, you should be able to promote you call to a live meeting, for now we will likely do this manually.
Live Meeting is the same product it always has been, but now in the BPOS package you get a license for everyone to be able to create meetings and can invite up to 15 people with the standard offering – which is enough for most collaborative meetings. I am planning to look at pricing for upgrades to be able to do web casts – the professional offering supports up to 1250 people.
Live meeting proved to be a fantastic solution for us to do our sprint planning for Project Aberdovey – the team had met for a project kickoff day before Christmas and had worked through the Sprint 0 requirements ready for the first Sprint to start on 4th Jan. Using Live Meeting, with web cams, white board and shared applications we were able to complete our Sprint planning game – decided what was in/out of the first sprint and agree and final adjustment to the story sizing.
Live Meeting I feel really is the main solution to our initial challenges around communication, it allows for very rich interaction and provides the quality of service that we need.
So far so good
Overall I have been impressed with the BPOS offerings, I have noticed no performance issues or service outages and have found that the value really is in the overall package.
I would recommend BPOS to people moving their email onto the cloud or for those looking for a more feature rich offering.
