BPOSTutor.com will host an expert interview on the new BPOS Federal offering in the coming weeks with David Lawson - a security and compliance SME who has evaluated Microsoft, SalesForce and Amazon's cloud offerings.  Some of the points we'll cover in the interview are -

• Differentiating the BPOS Federal offering from other cloud services
• Understanding some of the high-level security landscape issues for cloud services
• Emerging issues for decision makers in the Federal space with cloud services.

Stay tuned!

Good news for the Microsoft Could and BPOS!  Microsoft annouced in February that they will be creating a BPOS offering targeted towards Federal customers as well as those in education. The press release for the annoucement event is located here.  It's important to note that these additional security layers are only available to BPOS-D customers - this is not a shared hosting offering. 

The BPOS-D Products that the Federal offering apply to are as follows -

• Exchange Online Dedicated
• SharePoint Online Dedicated
• OCS Dedicated

LiveMeeting is specifically excluded from the Federal offering.

A few of the highlights are as follows -

• FISMA Certification (cooming soon)
• Multi-factor authentication (cooming soon)
• Live ID federation for Education customers
• Enhanced encryption
• Enhanced physical security for Federal Offerings and US Citizen-only technical personnel accessing the data center.

To read more in white paper form about the BPOS Federal offering see the Microsoft website.

SharePoint 2007 is a platform - it's not just about sharing documents - it is also a presentation layer for other data (from ERP systems, cubes, etc) and an application hosting platform for your own custom .net application and Microsoft products such as Project Server and Commerce Server. 

One of the common questions customers ask about BPOS SharePoint is its power to host "applications" - of course in a shared hosting environment there are more limitations than possibilities.  Recently I got asked about the potential of hosting Project Server on top of BPOS.  The short answer is not yet, but there are some rumblings that this will be made available at some point.

Until then after some research I found a highly recommended "PaaS" (Project Server as-a-Service) offering for SharePoint 2010 / Project Server 2010 beta via Project Hosts.  I saw a demo and looks well thought out, though the BI Center was not working against Project Server data quite yet.