What is BPOS? What is Microsoft Online? These are questions that a number of businesses seem to be asking in their search for Exchange Online, SharePoint Online, CRM Online and the other Microsoft-hosted cloud services. 

Microsoft Online is Microsoft’s “cloud” or “hosted” or “SaaS” versions of their popular products such as Exchange and SharePoint. You can use the Microsoft Cloud instead of buying hardware, licensing software and paying for configuration backup and maintenance. There are consulting fees to switch to Microsoft Online – it is not something you want to do completely alone, but they are far less than an on-site deployment. 

BPOS is an acronym for Business Productivity Online Suite which is a packaged offering from Microsoft Online.  In the BPOS package you get the benefit of buying power to lower the price of a group of products and services that if purchased separately would cost significantly more.

In the BPOS standard package you receive Exchange, SharePoint, OCS and LiveMeeting for about $10-$20 per user per month.  There are other add-ons such as Blackberry messaging and CRM which knock the price up slightly per user. The mailbox sizes for Exchange blow away any other third party provider so there’s not much use making a comparison there.

To make using all these hosted services easy and turnkey Microsoft has built a SSO client (Single Sign On).  This is a program that runs on each users’ computer and automatically signs them into their different hosted services and helps with password resets.  This lightweight, easy to use SSO client is another BPOS advantage over other services.  For example, once the user or IT installs the SSO client, all the user has to do it sign in and it will automatically configure Outlook and OCS messaging.

Microsoft Online and the BPOS package have been around since late 2008.  Microsoft provides reguarly quarterly updates to the service that are seamless to end users.  Hopefully this gives you a better idea what BPOS is!

LearnVu.com has an awesome screencast on Access 2010 Services (which runs on the next version of SharePoint or SharePoint Online).  Go check it out and see fully functional access reports, forms and DB's running natively from SharePoint 2010 in the browser!

Here's the link  http://www.learnvu.com/blog/post/Creating-Web-Applications-in-Access-2010-and-SharePoint-2010.aspx

If you use OCS (Office Communication Server) on premise you know the power of instant communication with full integration with the Microsoft stack (SharePoint, Exchange and Office on the desktop).  Microsoft Online Services has OCS as an available option and it is included in the BPOS package.  To enable OCS you need to log into the administration center (http://www.admin.microsoftonline.com) and then click on the services tab.  After that you just click the link in the top navigation to Office Communications Online and then click the enable tab.  Check out the BPOS tutorial screencast on just this process below.