Microsoft Online Services Deep Dive Session

I was at the session presented by John Betz and Todd Wanke titled “Deep Dive into Microsoft’s Next Generation Online Services for Communication and Collaboration”. John announced the availability of online services at the Keynote speech and showed a very brief demo of what was on offer. This session went into more details of how MSFT plans to provide a rich experience of hosted SharePoint Services and Exchange on a Software + Services platform.

From a services perspective this is currently available as a Beta and you will need a live ID to sign into the services. Once signed in you get the ability to create a SharePoint site and use a software client tool to integrate the sign on with your existing Active Directory infrastructure. This means that you can leverage your user data store. The service also provides hosted exchange with mail capability. There are plans to add CRM (Dynamics) as well as other MSFT solutions in the future.

With the future capabilities of voice and data communications of OCS and the huge infrastructure investment (John showed some of the data center photos!)  MSFT has already put into this service I see that this will be beneficial for organisations who do not see an immediate need for a large deployment. At the start the services offered will be some what limited with the option of moving into a dedicated deployment on dedicated hardware. In my opinion this is good for partners and customers to easily get into using these services by focusing on business issues rather than getting too much into technology issues.

The licensing model has not yet been finalised. So watch out for more details of this in the future. From a simplistic view the current model that MSFT has presented is per customer based. So you don’t need to worry about CALs and what not. Well not yet anyway. Depending on the Software + Services you want the cost will vary.