Brendon Ford from Provoke Solutions in Wellington is now talking at the SharePoint Conference 2009 in New Zealand.

BPOS is a subset of Microsoft Online Services (cloud-based services). BPOS stands for “business productivity online suite” … Exchange, SharePoint, OCS and Live Meeting.

Why BPOS?
– if your server room is a disaster zone, perhaps BPOS can help out.
– if your server room is old and out-of-date, perhaps BPOS gives you a new way of doing things.
– if you have no disaster recovery approach, then perhaps BPOS can help out
– if you want to make life easier for system administrators (because there is so much to learn and do), then BPOS is an alternative.
– if you can’t find any good system admins or infrastructure engineers, then perhaps BPOS provides you a way of doing things.
– if you want to extend and scale your infrastructure to new offices and locations, then BPOS
– can also provide a sandbox for experimentation

Brendon gave a demo of BPOS.
– he showed creating new users
– he showed creating a new site
– he showed that you can set up co-existence between a local Exchange server and Exchange Onilne.
– he showed a way of integrating other services into BPOS.
When a user is signed up, they get an email alert.
– users should install the Microsoft Online Services sign in. It keeps users logged in.
– the sign-in client takes you to your Online Services home page.

There are some things you don’t get with BPOS:
– no My Sites
– some search, but not total SharePoint search
– no mail-enabled lists
– can’t use the social networking web part
– no business intellgence nor business forms (no Forms Server)
– … and various other things

Other Resources
Brendon blogs at brendon.provoke.co.nz

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