Why companies choose Microsoft BPOS / Office 365 over Google Apps

Today, Computerworld published a good article by Shane O’Neill titled “Why We Chose Exchange Online, Not Google Apps”

The author of the article, based on customer testimonials, explains why Winston-Salem selected Microsoft hosted Outlook over Google Apps. While I have touched on this point many times over, for every business owner, it always comes down to three key criteria:

1. How familiar are my employees with Microsoft Outlook and Microsoft Office applications vs. Gmail and Google Apps?
2. How much money have we already invested in Microsoft licenses, i.e. Microsoft Office, SharePoint, etc?
3. Extent of required end-user training we will have to provide to ensure that the solution is quickly adopted by all employees

As you can see, the selection process can be fairly simple and at times, majority of decision makers will favor a technology that their users are already familiar with, without looking at  feature and functionality, or even price tag.

It is important to remember, that choosing your cloud provider will have long-term effects on your business, and if your competitors selected a more agile, feature-reach collaboration platform, they may beat you at your own game. Hence, the selection process must include a much more detailed review and analysis of all pros and cons prior to making a commitment to a particular technology or vendor.

Until next time,

Steve Driz

Getting Google Apps to 99.99%

On January 14th, Google posted Service Level Agreement (SLA) related data as it applies to Google Apps for both business and individual customers.

In 2010, Gmail was available 99.984% of the time, which translates into approximately 7 minutes of downtime per month, and basically represents accumulation of small delays throughout the year.

Google Apps Downtime 2010

Compatible data for Microsoft BPOS for 2010 shows 113 incidents, 74 unplanned outages and 33 days with planned downtime.

Considering the above data, Google Apps seems more reliable compared to Microsoft BPOS. In several blog posts, Microsoft reiterated that guaranteed uptime is one of the key priorities for BPOS and its future successor – Office365 that is currently in Beta.

Read more

Microsoft launches Office 365 as an aggressive approach to cloud applications

Based on Microsoft’s official press release, the company has launched a new cloud platform Microsoft Office 365. The new brand includes all features of Microsoft BPOS, i.e. Exchange Online, SharePoint Online,  as well as ever green Office desktop application such as Word, Excel and PowerPoint a.k.a. Office Web Apps, now available as a part of Office 365. In addition, it includes Microsoft Lync – Communications Server in the cloud.

By introducing a fully integrated suite of products in the cloud, Microsoft is set to raise the bar on the existing cloud offerings including those offered by the competition. It would be interesting to see if Google has something up their sleeve.

Read full press release

Official Microsoft Office 365 website

More Microsoft BPOS Access Issues as Users Report Additional Outages

Thanks to yet another report by ZDNet’s Mary-Jo Foley, we keep learning about new occurrences of Microsoft BPOS outages following reports. According to the source, majority of Microsoft hosted services outages affect Exchange Online, Microsoft’s hosted Exchange service.

By not addressing these issues swiftly, Microsoft is playing a dangerous game toying with consumer confidence yet again. One would think that an organization of this size such as Microsoft would have sufficient and effective business continuity measures in place to ensure that a service they promote is accessible at the very least. Don’t get me wrong, I do understand that things happen and that systems generally need to be maintained, but I refuse to understand outages when we talk about mission critical systems or services such as corporate email.

As a side-note, I don’t see or hear Google bash Microsoft for incurring downtime that to me shows which organization is more “mature” in terms of its ethical values.

Read full story

Microsoft Apologizes for Cloud Outage

It seems that Microsoft cloud platform, BPOS is not immune to outages and is not as stable as they made us believe having bashed Google for outages associated with Google Apps services. On Monday August 23, 2010, Microsoft cloud services were inaccessible for approximately 2-hours. Read the full story at Datamation.

Quick Poll

Microsoft BPOS Catches Up to Google Apps on Email Storage

Microsoft Online Services – March BPOS Update

On Friday March 26, 2010, Microsoft announced to its partners and resellers that Microsoft Online Services were significantly enhanced to provide BPOS (Business Productivity Online Suite) and Exchange Online Standard users with much larger mailboxes, increased number of SharePoint site collections, simplified and improved domain management, file attachment feature to service requests, support for Mac OS X Snow Leopard, enhancements to Live Meeting usage report, and enhancement to Live Meeting recording publications process. Additionally, Microsoft issued Online Services sign-in application hotfix fixing some issues that predominantly affected Windows XP users, and Office Outlook users in languages other than English.

This is a significant enhancement to Microsoft Online Services in an attempt to match Google Apps offering specifically when it comes to mailbox size. From now on, all BPOS users will get 25GB mailboxes, however, according to Microsoft this change will not be automatically applied to the existing services. An administrator will have to resize the existing mailboxes using an online tool. While Microsoft catches up to Google Apps on email storage, there is still a limit on SharePoint site collection that went up from 20 to 100 site collections. In comparison, as a part of Google Apps, Google Site does not limit users to any particular number of sites.

According to Microsoft, deployment of this service update in being rolled-out and will be completed for all regions by the end of March.

In line with the changes, you can request an updated copy of a complete feature-for-feature comparison between Microsoft BPOS and Google Apps Premier by contacting us.

Until next time,

Steve E. Driz

Microsoft Compares BPOS to Google Apps

As SaaS space heats-up, both Microsoft and Google are not wasting their time and put a ton of effort on developing additional features for their respective hosted offerings – Microsoft BPOS and Google Apps.

In a blog post by Barb Mosher of CMS Wire, she speaks about increasing competition between Microsoft BPOS and Google Apps offerings. In January of 2010, Microsoft went as far as develop their own version of hosted services comparison named “Fact-Based Comparison of Hosted Services”, comparing Google Apps with Microsoft BPOS.

I wanted to take this opportunity to remind our dear readers that we still offer complimentary copies of our own feature-for-feature comparative analysis document. You can request your copy by contacting us.

Having reviewed Microsoft’s hosted services comparison document, we noticed that some statements made by Microsoft where inaccurate. I have started a discussion by commending on the original post that grow into a dialog with Andrew Kisslo, Sr. Product Manager at Microsoft.

For additional information, visit the original post, and scroll down for comments.

Until next time,

Steve E. Driz

Thanks for your patronage!

Over the past several weeks we have received overwhelming response and a large number of requests concerning Google Apps Premium vs. Microsoft BPOS blog post. We would like to thank all our valued customers, readers and friends for their ongoing patronage.

We are working closely with our business partners to bring you the most comprehensive tools that will support your decisions when it comes to selection of SaaS and Cloud computing vendors.

Our team is always ready to help your business. Please contact us for further information, and we will strive to respond within 2 business hours.

Stay tuned…
The Driz Group

New Capabilities of Microsoft BPOS

Today, Microsoft has announced the new capabilities of its Business Productivity Online Suite (BPOS) by sending an email to existing BPOS customers. The new capabilities include what Microsoft calls “IM & Presence Awareness,” and includes Microsoft Office Communications Online or simply web-based instant messaging that can be restricted for use within your organization.  According to the Microsoft Online Services (MOS) website, the service can be purchased separately from BPOS, starting at $2.50 per user, per month. The only caveat according to Microsoft is that in order to use it, you must purchase and install Microsoft Office Communicator 2007 R2. When implemented, users may use the service directly over the Internet, or through either RAS or VPN connection.

As always, Microsoft includes a datasheet on the MOS website that includes the solution highlights as well as the most noteworthy features and limitations. According to the source, Microsoft Office Communications Online integrates with Microsoft Office 2007 and SharePoint sites.

One of the key security features is that all IM text is automatically encrypted, meaning that the communication channel is secure. Other security features include enhanced URL filtering and file filter controls that will scan the files distributed through the IM.

As far as limitations are concerned, according to the datasheet, each user can have up to 250 contacts. In our view, this is more than enough, and if you need more contacts for your day-to-day IM activities, you must seek professional help.

Integration with the in-house Active Directory and the Microsoft managed Active Directory is achieved through use of the Directory Synchronization Tool. Another neat feature is that, similar to other services, Microsoft Office Communications Online can be accessed using the same sign-in tool.

Over the next couple week, we intend to test the solution and provide our valued readers with the additional information.

You can download complete datasheets for the Microsoft Office Communications Online directly from the source:

·         Standard (minimum 5 seats)

·         Dedicated (minimum 5000 seats)

 

Until next time,

The Driz Group

Conspiracy theory, or Microsoft’s new Cloud “strategy”?

 

Friends,

Today I am going off-topic because I believe in professional integrity, business ethics, and good business practices. Having been an IT executive for almost two decades, I thought I had seen it all when it comes to questionable competitive strategies. I must note that normally I don’t believe in conspiracy theories and would not want to create one. What I’m about to tell you may not sound outrageous, but I urge you to take a moment and think about the consequences should such business practices become the norm.

Every blog is subject to scrutiny by its readers. I’m confident that every blogger looks forward to receiving comments because it means the topic is of interest to others. While some comments can be positive, negative, provocative, weird etc., others deserve special attention. I am not talking about blatant spam. It deserves no attention and more often than not is taken care of by anti-spam filters. The majority of spam comments are made by amateur Internet marketers who try to implement black-hat marketing tactics, hoping to succeed. Well, good luck with that.

Last week, a comment I would normally consider as spam truly caught my attention. A person commented on the Google Apps^TM vs. Microsoft^TM BPOS comparative analysis post. The idea behind the comment was clearly to negate the value of Google Apps using unfounded references, as if people had never seen or used Google Apps. The writer was trying to convince others that the product offering is not up to par and that Microsoft BPOS is, without doubt, the way to go.  

We all have personal preferences when it comes to pretty much everything—from food to vacation destinations. However, for the record, I would like to state that at the time the comparative analysis document was developed, we did not have any preference one way or the other. If you take a moment to review the blog entry in question, you will quickly realize that all we do is express our opinion while striving to provide an objective review based on a series of tests of both Google Apps Premium and Microsoft BPOS.

I always look up the originating IP address every time I receive a comment notification, unless it is blatant spam. To my surprise, the IP address in question resolved to tide534.microsoft.com. According to various web sources, tidexxx.microsoft.com IP addresses are Microsoft internal proxy servers. It seems that at times, traffic from a similar source targets blogs and other web resources, specifically those that have to do with Microsoft technologies. Thus far, the “tide” was silently visiting, but now it has spoken. The visitor in question used an anonymous Yahoo!^TM email address that seems to be valid. Several hours later, I received a request from Microsoft employee for a complete comparative analysis document. The request was fulfilled; however I have not received any feedback.

In my view, based on the above information, it is safe to assume that the writer is either a Microsoft employee or at least affiliated with the company in some way so that they have access to Microsoft’s internal network. Now the question is why would a Microsoft employee comment on a blog post that specifically touches on its own product and clearly shows that the product performance and/or features fall short compared to direct competition? Call me naive, but I do not have an answer. It seems very low for an organization like Microsoft to employ such tactics in order to compete, not to mention it is an unfair practice. Can you imagine what would happen if competitors start trashing each other’s products in blogs, forums, and other social media mediums?

Right or wrong? You decide.

Until next time,

Steve E. Driz