Microsoft announced Office 365 a while ago as the successor of their Business Productivity Online Suite (BPOS), it is currently in public Beta and there are lot of signs that it will be released shortly.
For those of you not familiar with BPOS, it’s Microsoft’s on-line suite for business Email and Collaboration (see here for an overview of functionality). BPOS allows colleagues to delegate email and calendars, share information and meet and chat on-line.
What’s new?
Office 365 will be a more coherent product than BPOS was with the separate components more tightly integrated. Exchange and Sharepoint will be accessed via the same portal and Office Live Meeting and Office Communications Online are bundled into one product: Lync 2010.
Also, as the name suggests, Office 365 will have strong links to the MS Office suite. A license for Office Professional Plus will be included in the Enterprise version, in addition to the integrated Office web apps (lightweight on-line version of Microsoft Office available in all but the entry level plans E1 and K1).
Office 365 will be using the 2010 series of server products: Exchange 2010 and Sharepoint 2010, bringing new and improved features and Office 2010 integrations (such as better browser support, off-line synchronisation, real-time collaboration and e-mail conversation view).
Office 365 will offer users more self-management features with the ability for them to import mail from POP and IMAP, wipe mobile devices and manage groups. They are also offered help through wizards on common tasks like setting up a mobile to access their email.
Office 365 will also have much improved Sharepoint functionality and for the first time it will be possible to share information with external users. You will also be able to use web databases, use lists and libraries off-line via Sharepoint workspace and have a greater choice of site templates.
Office 365 will also offer federated identity (authentication through the existing Active Directory) and optional 2-factor authentication.
For a more detailed walkthrough of the new Office 365 features, see here
Wait or migrate?
Microsoft offers their current BPOS customers a year to migrate to Office 365. Of course, they take care of all the server side upgrades, with the organisations left to make sure that client requirements are met, users are informed and trained, and desktop software is installed (Service Connector & Lync).
Smaller organisations that want to move to Microsoft Online Services don’t need to wait, they can start with BPOS right now. Migration to Office 365 will be easy as long as desktop requirements are met (XP SP3, Mac OS X 10.5 and Office 2007 or greater).
The Single Sign On will need to be replaced with the Service Connector when moving to Office 365. It might make sense not to install Office Communications and Live Meeting software right now and go directly for Lync when it is released as part of Office 365.
Larger organisations might be better of waiting for the Office 365 release as upgrading and retraining users formally might be a costly affair. In addition, they will be able to benefit from federated identity support in Office 365 and two-factor authentication might be another important feature for some.
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