BPOS and Office 365
What is BPOS?
BPOS is “Business Productivity Online Suite”. I hear a chorus of “And what does that mean?” Basically it is a set of useful business tools including the following:
- Exchange for providing email, access to calendar and tasks.
- SharePoint online for collaborating on project and documents, not only internally but with customers and partners as well.
- Microsoft Office Live Meeting for having meetings, hosting training sessions and conferences over the internet.
- Microsoft Office Communications online for instant messaging with work colleagues.
All of this is done paid for through a monthly subscription service with no upfront licence costs.
What are the benefits?
- Businesses spend a lot of money on their IT systems. TCO or Total Cost of Ownership includes buying, installing, maintaining systems as well as training staff. It also includes things you may not think of such as the increased power consumption meaning higher electric bills. BPOS saves a company buying large amounts of hardware including new servers. It can easily be installed on your PC or laptop providing it has an internet connection and it is a fairly recent model. Most PCs built in the last three years should have no problem running it.
- Installation is straight forward, once BPOS itself is set up for your organisation. You simply need to download and run two files then sign in. BPOS does the rest of the configuration for you. This simple installation and lack of on-going server support needs means less technical know-how is needed in house can be a big cost saving over the long term.
- Another great advantage is that the subscription model means you’re always using an up-to-date version of the software. No more agonising over whether to spend the money to upgrade to the latest and greatest version of Office!
- Backup software and the maintenance of it can be expensive and time consuming but BPOS is automatically backed up and offers redundancy across several datacentres. This saves you administering the backup system or the expense of having a third party do it for you. It also means that as long as you have access to a computer and an internet connection, you can access BPOS.
What is Office 365?
Office 365 is effectively the new version of BPOS. It uses the latest server software including Microsoft Exchange 2010. There are different plan levels on Office 365, allowing you to choose the applications you need so you are not paying for software you do not want.
What advantages does Office 365 have over BPOS?
There are many improvements with the new version as the newer versions of Exchange, SharePoint and the like have all got much improved functionality and ease of use. However, one of the most obvious changes is the provision of online web app versions of familiar applications such as Word and Excel. These are browser based versions of the usual Office applications and whilst they don’t have all the features of the full version they can be accessed from anywhere through a browser. Of course, many users will use the usual versions of Microsoft Office to work with their Office 365 system and you can now ‘rent’ Office as part of your monthly subscription, again helping your cashflow by avoiding the upfront licence payment.
Another advantage is that, unlike BPOS, there are no lower limits on the number of users so even a one person business can benefit from Office 365.
I already have BPOS, how do I make the change to Office 365?
Microsoft is giving BPOS customers one year to make the transition to Office 365. The server side of the transition is handled by Microsoft including the migration of all your data. You would need to download the latest version of the Single Sign On application which is now called Lync client. And you will have to download and install the latest version of the sign on application. This should all be straightforward but we’ll have to wait and see!
