Tag Archives: BPOS

BPOS 2010 and “Superset”

I was reading one of these pretty generic blah-like articles on BPOS (Microsoft’s exchange and SharePoint in the cloud) and thankfully waded through to the end:

In terms of other near-term deliverables, Microsoft is commiting to provide in BPOS v.Next native PowerShell scripting via a PowerShell endpoint build on PowerShell Version 2. Authentication will be done through Online IDs, with a single credential being able to be used for both PowerShell and the portal.Keane echoed the message other Microsoft execs have been voicing at TechEd this week: Cloud capabilities, over time, will  become a superset of what is available on-premises. Currently, the reverse is true, and Microsoft’s Online services offer a subset of the functions available in the software equivalents of each product.

The notion that the cloud will provide more capability than on-premise is new to me. I wonder how true that is going to be in the end.  It feels counterintuitive to me.  I totally get the idea that a lot of companies will move stuff to the cloud (or start off in the cloud) but I normally think they do it because the pro’s (easier admin, SLAs, etc) far outweigh the cons (reduced functionality). 

I’m having a little bit of a hard time believing that cloud offerings will exceed on-prem capabilities.  Multi-tenant is hard and seems like it must force compromises in order to provide good SLA and ease of use…

I’ll probably be eating my words on this.  I remember thinking that no one could possibly need more than 650 mb of data and therefore, the CD was never going to be improved upon.

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SharePoint Online and InfoPath

I may be the last person to realize this, but SharePoint Online (which I often hear people say is a glorified WSS) supports InfoPath Forms Services.  That’s pretty powerful stuff, especially considering that IP FS is a MOSS Enterprise feature and BPOS is something like $1.99/month for 10,000 users.  Maybe it’s a little more than that.

So, SharePoint Online defies easy definition.  It has this enterprise feature, but no anonymous access (which even WSS supports).  You can do some interesting stuff with search (MOSS-ish, since you can define site level scopes), but if you need access to the SSP, you can’t do it.  You can play the “on the one hand and on the other” game all night long with this product 🙂

Microsoft is due to release a new version of SP Online in the next few months.  I wonder what weird hybrid it’s going be?

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