Yesterday I followed a 1 day crash course on BPOS at QWISE.

It was just what i needed to get me to look into the Business Productivity Online Standard Suite of Microsoft. I already signed up for an account, but did not have the time to really look into it.

My first impression is that it is a great product, especially for small company’s which do not have a IT department and are considering to buy a server. If your company’s only needs mail, then this product is surely the way to go. You will also get document management (SharePoint) and Communications (OCS).

The exchange part of BPOS is really great. No on-premises servers needed. And it works like a charm.

SharePoint is less then you’re used to if you run it on-premises. Especially when you’re used to the enterprise version. No Excel Services, no enterprise data search, no My Sites. But this will be solved in a future release for sure. The D-version (dedicated) of BPOS can do more, but prices are still unknown (and you’re company must have +5000 users)

Office Communicator is also great. The only problem we had is that after changing our default domain, we could not authenticate with our new domain. Which is rather important off course
edit: i just installed ocs and the login tool on a VM @ home, and the login with the new domain is working now.

Some things I wrote down:

• only €12,78 (thx Peter) for an account, with a minimum of 5 account.
• You can sync your AD and BPOS with the AD Sync tool.
• To migrate your current exchange, you can use the Migration Tool. You don’t have to migrate with a big bang, but can do this gradually.
• Keep note of the admin login credentials, it’s really difficult the get them again so write them down.
• When you register the “Ship To” address is used to determine in which datacenter your data will be stored. For some company’s this can be important (legal issue’s)
• There is only a sync between your AD and BPOS when you use the AD sync tool (which cannot run on a Domain Controller, Server 2008 or x64). Because no passwords are synced, this can cause mismatching between AD and BPOS.
• you’ll get 5gb mailbox storage per user license and 250mb sharpoint storage per user license. Which you can divide the way you like.
• The sign in application does not work on Home SKU’s (i.e vista home)
• Bij exchange co-existance (on and off premises), you don’t have shared calendar’s
• Mailbox migration (especialy from exchange 2003): watch your language settings. You could end up with 2 inboxes (inbox and inkomende email = dutch)

Great Product