It was about a year ago when I first really started to talk to Microsoft about BPOS (Business Productivity Online Suite). Now there's an awful lot I know, but cannot write down here because of NDA. But here's what I do know and can say. Please note, however, that this is also my own personal opinion. Now this summary of my thoughts is not about the technicalities. Microsoft publish a lot of information about what BPOS is technically and how it works. No, this is about dealing with Microsoft and some of he nuances I've come across when considering BPOS. Let me be clear, my company does not use BPOS but having done research, talked to other customers of Microsoft and trialled the BPOS offering I've learned quite a bit. I'm hoping this summary will come across as balanced and pragmatic. I'm certainly neither pro-BPOS, nor against it. Let's say I'm a bit undecided.
What is BPOS?
BPOS comprises primarily of four key Microsoft productivity products: Exchange, SharePoint, Office Communications Server and Live Meeting. All in all these give you: email and calendaring, document sharing and basic websites, instant messaging, presence and desktop voice and video as well as Web conferencing. So on the surface it's a fairly broad package.
BPOS comes in two flavours (and price ranges) namely Standard and Dedicated. Now this part is really important because it's the major difference between Microsoft's approach and other Cloud services providers like Google. Google want to have one giant datacenter offering where everyone pretty much gets the same thing, the same level of functionality. For the vast majority of SME's this is probably going to be exactly what they need. Cheap, reliable, works anywhere, basic features to get the job done (and have up to about 5,000 employees). Most Enterprise customers are generally coming from an environment where all of their productivity stuff is hosted on premise in their own server rooms. It's likely to have been customised to hell and have lots of bolt-ons, plug-ins and a whole variety of management stuff. That's where the Dedicated offering comes in. The main difference is that Dedicated is aimed at those larger companies. Companies will more than 5,000 IT users. Microsoft will actually procure servers and put your company's name on them in their data centres. There'll be no sharing of servers for the 'big guys' whether you want to or not. I've enquired many times as to why I've got to have Dedicated just because there are more than 5,000 people in the company I work for. Microsoft always tell me "well, that's the way it is".
Thoughts on pricing structure
I suppose the important part comes with regard to how much this all costs. Well, although Microsoft buy servers for you and dedicates them to your company the Dedicated pricing scales quite well. And at the top end (15,000+ IT users) it ends up being cheaper than the Standard offering anyway. So large organisations start to benefit from lower per / user, per / month pricing and also get the widest range of features. You have to have the Dedicated offering if you want 'multi-party voice and video' in Office Communicator, for example (more on that though later). There are also restrictions related to SharePoint on the Standard platform. You're restricted to the 'out-of-the-box' features and Microsoft is unlikely to want to host your whole SharePoint-based Intranet, for example. That's where Dedicated comes in. You can do more, because they're your servers. That's why some people I've spoken to don't call the Dedicated offering 'Cloud computing' at all, it's simply hosting. You see, Cloud computing in many definitions, especially that one advocated by Nicolas Carr, is not just hosting servers in someone's large data centre it's also about Utility Computing - you only pay for what you use. And Microsoft, is far far far away from this idea.
Licensing for BPOS requires, as with all Microsoft licensing, a Masters degree in licensing. If choosing between Standard and Dedicated is not enough then you also choose whether to 'step-up' or to take the offering as a complete service. The difference here is that many companies will have existing licenses. Copies of Exchange, Office etc. that they've all ready paid for. So if you've all ready paid for something you shouldn't have to pay for it again. That's where the 'step-up' pricing comes in. All you're paying for is the cost of the service for Microsoft to host your servers. If you don't own licenses you can go for the complete service offering. This is clearly more expensive than the step-up but means that you don't have to worry about CAL's (client access licenses) for all of the products. It is possible to license each of the products included in BPOS individually. If you go for two or more though the pricing works out that you can take all four products for the price for about three.
Unfortunately BPOS still uses the Client Access License (CAL) model for how it is licensed. Microsoft still fail to acknowledge concurrent user models or at least a model based upon actual metered usage of the applications. Perhaps this will come in time, but at the moment you tell Microsoft how many users licenses you want and that's what you pay for. This doesn't provide any greater flexibility than Microsoft's model of selling CAL's for it's client applications or Windows when it comes to growth or shrinkage of a company's employee-base. Arguably, no change then from the experience that many companies have with Microsoft licensing.
One aspect of BPOS licensing that did interest me is the 'Deskless worker' offering. This effectively provides the option for a service devoid of client software. So you get Outlook Web Access, SharePoint, Communicator Web Access etc. without the full fat Office suite. I think this is useful for business areas who have typically not needed the full Office client but need email, document sharing etc. like Call Centres, Field staff, etc. It's quite a bit cheaper than the normal Standard and Dedicated offerings. I'm sure this offering will be even more compelling when SharePoint 2010 adds the Office Web Apps for Word, Excel, PowerPoint, OneNote etc.
Getting there
So, in terms of 'doing' BPOS what have I discovered? It is always possible to take a trial. Be aware though that you can only trial the Standard service. Microsoft will not set up a Dedicated environment jut for the purposes of testing it. This means that I have no experience of migrating mailboxes in Exchange, migrating SharePoint sites, buddy lists in MOC or anything else like that. What I got was a completely barren environment totally separate from my 'normal' work software infrastructure. As Microsoft Office Communicator can only be configured to point at one OCS environment I decided not to change that. I didn't see the point in connecting to a OCS server that I only had 5 buddies on, whereas the internal one had dozens. Oh, and free-busy information doesn't seem to filter through to MOC. Point being, if you're going to trial BPOS then don't expect much. Plan exactly what you want to get out of it and don't expect to be able to do much beyond checking if it works. If you're a 'normal' user like I am without administrative privileges to your local PC, forget about it. Get your IT department to lab it. So, suffice to say, the only way to find out if BPOS will really work for you - and cater for all of your IT infrastructure's idiosyncrasies is to actually do it for real. Scary stuff huh? Actually, that's not strictly true because I'm sure Microsoft would pull out all the stops if they knew they were going to get a potential multi-million dollar contract signed.
The future version of BPOS (which will come later this year) will allow a better experience for trial users. Gone will be the 'sign-on' client - a piece of software that Standard user need to use in order to achieve a kind of single sign-on to the services - to be replaced by proper ADFS 2.0 / Geneva funky SAML tokens goodness. Fundamentally it's like an NT trust between your organisation and Microsoft (or other service provider). Some bits of what are exclusively in the Dedicated service will creep down into the Standard etc. And still later (don't ask me when though) the Wave 14 products will appear via BPOS. So that means Exchange 2010, SharePoint 2010 and then later still Office Communicator 2010. The discreet product called Live Meeting is being absorbed wholly into Office Communications Server 2010. One less client to worry about. Yay. Which brings me to an awfully important point.
Cost of ownership
The cost of upgrading server infrastructure from one version to the next (of Windows Server, of SharePoint for example) is included in the service charge. For a lot of IT departments that spend ages migrating at some considerable cost this alone could be a giant reason to take the service. Microsoft will do this pretty much automatically for the Standard environment. For Dedicated subscribers, you can delay should you wish to upgrade. Remember this is only for the server products that Microsoft host. You'll still need to upgrade client software (such as Office) yourself. This means that the service charge can act as Software Assurance. Microsoft clearly don't have the same rapid feature deployment model (or capability) that Google do with Google Apps and still prefer and maintain the 'big bang' approach. Knowing that the cost to take on new versions of Exchange, SharePoint and Office Communicator is included in the service charge is something quite compelling though. I'm not sure what 'on boarding' capabilities come included in the service charge though. Swapping the back end versions is sometimes relatively straightforward compared to the cost of retraining for a new product for end-users. There's still a bit of ambiguity about this one - do Microsoft test and keep all your data intact when performing the upgrade? - for example.
Caveat Emptor
Taking the BPOS service directly from Microsoft has some interesting twists related to the functionality available to you if you're situated in Europe, for example. I learned that the audio and video capabilities of Office Communicator were unavailable to companies with employees in Germany. Microsoft are not a licensed telecommunications carrier under German regulation, therefore cannot provide such services. There are potential ways around this - namely take the BPOS service from a Microsoft partner who is a licensed carrier e.g. T-Systems in Germany, BT in the UK. It's certainly something to be aware of. The standard Microsoft whitepapers about the BPOS service do not highlight this though as they're primarily still focused on the US market. From my own experience Microsoft are now realising that there's a marketplace beyond the US. You'd think this would be burning their ears after the battering the EU keeps giving them.
I've also got some queries about the actual support that a customer would receive from Microsoft. What if you screw up your SharePoint site? (happens all the time) Will MS just restore the last database backup or will they walk a user through getting the site back (if that's actually possible in SharePoint). I don't know. It is, for me, what makes the difference between a service and simply hosting the boxes running the software.
Summing up
BPOS is in it's infancy. But it's growing up quickly. I think it's been through three of four versions in the 14 months or so that I've been keeping tabs on it. That's included new features, new product models and licensing options, launches in new countries, availability of more data centres (if, for legal reasons, you need your data in your local jurisdiction) and will continue with future changes that will come as the '2010' versions of the products make their way into the service. Full beta / TAP testing of that starts soon supposedly. Looking further forward it's evident to me (from the time I spend talking with Microsoft product managers) that the Wave 15 Office products (at a guess coming in 2013/14) are being designed very much with BPOS / Cloud in mind.
Don't underestimate Microsoft's business acumen though. By that I mean the professional nature and knowledge of their sales teams. They handle themselves in corporate environments much better than some of their competitors in this space do. I think of my experiences with Google in the enterprise to date and comical (and scary) moments come to mind like a Google sales manager telling me that 'compliance is boring' when it came to enterprise email and only being able to pay for a Google apps pilot with a credit card. Yes, times are a changing, but Microsoft take compliance increasingly seriously and I think see it as a path to competitive advantage in the ever paranoid enterprise applications space. Microsoft are keen to win business here, I'm sure there are some really good deals that can be done.
Posted via email from gazcoop
