A frequent question I receive is how to monitor the availability of BPOS and how to access BPOS service notifications.   There's a few good techniques and resources out there.  In my experience, BPOS availability has been great and I've only had one issue since August 2008 when I started using it. It cleared up within a minute or two.  Here's a couple of good tips:

Monitoring BPOS

There's a few different ways to monitor your BPOS service.  If you own a monitoring tool such as Solar Winds' IPMonitor (http://www.solarwinds.com/products/ipmonitor/) you can easily configure fairly sophisticated queries against your various BPOS service URLs such as SharePoint sites or OWA.  I generally configure some alerts againsts my SharePoint sites and OWA.  In the use of your BPOS service you also rely on either your own DNS hosting infrastructure or perhaps a third parties.  I set up QoS monitoring on all my DNS servers - remember if DNS is not working properly mail flow, your website and other services may not function as you have designed.  You can also probably monitor SMTP by configuring a dedicated user (consuming a license) and using an SMTP monitoring rule that can be configured to support authentication (these are available in the IPMonitor product). 

BPOS Service Notifications

BPOS Service Notifications are another great way to keep in touch with Microsoft annouced service issues or maintenance. 

North America Microsoft Online Services Standard RSS Feed https://rss.microsoftonline.com/

APAC Microsoft Online Services Standard RSS Feed https://rss.apac.microsoftonline.com/

Europe Microsoft Online Services Standard RSS Feed https://rss.emea.microsoftonline.com/ 

Message Filtering RSS Feed http://rss.messaging.microsoft.com/ 

Microsoft recently upgraded the BPOS mailbox storage limit from 5GB to 25GB. While new users get the 25GB limit automatically, you need to manually upgrade your existing users to take advantage of the new limit. This short tutorial will show you how: http://www.screencast.com/t/NzM5NjEwZDEt

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.