Microsoft Apologizes for BPOS Outages

As a conclusion following a series of Microsoft BPOS outages over the past several weeks, on September 8th, Microsoft issued a statement on Microsoft Online Services Team Blog apologizing for recent outages that affected customers that use Microsoft hosted services such as Exchange Online and SharePoint Online. By issuing a timely apology to its customers, Microsoft shows that they are serious about making BPOS a success while understanding that service reliability is key for any business that hosted services providers.

My name is Morgan Cole, and I lead a team at Microsoft whose mission is to make sure that BPOS customers have a great experience with our services. We aspire to deliver quality services, and in the last couple of weeks, we have fallen short of this aspiration. During this time, we experienced two network access issues in North America, and just yesterday, two brief periods of service degradation also affecting users served from North America. These incidents were unique to BPOS and not related to other Microsoft services.

I wanted to write here to apologize to you, our customers, for any inconvenience these issues may have caused. We know how important these services are to the daily operation of your business, and we take our responsibility as your partner and service provider very seriously.

I also want to provide a bit more detail about the recent issues.

Specific to the August 23 event: our proactive efforts to upgrade to next generation network infrastructure caused unforeseen problems that affected access to some services. Operations and Engineering quickly identified a design issue in the upgrade that caused unexpected impact, but the issue resulted in a 2-hour period of intermittent access for BPOS organizations served from North America.

The August 23 event was remediated, but the solution did not resolve another underlying issue which created subsequent problems on September 3rd and 7th. BPOS customers experienced brief periods of service degradation, primarily affecting the sign-in service and administrative portals. The impact during the afternoon of September 7th had more widespread customer impact, although the duration was relatively short. We performed emergency maintenance to isolate suspect traffic, which has proven successful in stabilizing the service. We continue to monitor the network and all services to ensure stable operations. Needless to say we, like you, find the events unacceptable and have 24/7 efforts underway to ensure we do not have a repeat of these events.

We appreciate the serious responsibility we have as a service provider to you, and we know that any issue with the service is a disruption to your business – and that’s not acceptable. I can assure you that we are investing the time and resources required to ensure we are living up to your – and our own – expectations for a quality service experience every day.

As always, if you are experiencing any service issues, we encourage customers to contact us. Our customer support is available 24 hours a day by telephone or via Service Requests submitted from the Microsoft Online Services Administration Center.

Microsoft SharePoint 2010: New features for your business

SharePoint is a business collaboration and content management platform used for document collaboration, creating company wikis, blogs, Web sites, Intranet sites, and more. SharePoint also provides additional features like a company portal and centralized content libraries.

SharePoint integrates with Office 2010 and Office Web Apps to provide the Microsoft Office experience across the web, the desktop, phone and browser.

New and enhanced features of SharePoint 2010 include better collaboration, ability for several people to edit a document in real-time similar to the exisiting feature of Google Apps, new website design tools and last but not least, off-line access and synchronization.

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Google Apps vs. Microsoft BPOS – Comparative Analysis

Friends,

Over the past two weeks we were busy testing Microsoft Business Productivity Online Standard Suite, or simply BPOS offered as a part of Microsoft Online Services, and as a part of Microsoft’s new software plus service strategy. The offering includes Microsoft Exchange Online, Microsoft SharePoint Online, Microsoft Office Live Meeting, Microsoft Office Communications Online*.

While Microsoft is clearly playing catch-up with Google Apps, and firmly believes that they are number one player in the cloud computing, based on the independent test of both offering performed by our team, we must conclude that at present Microsoft BPOS falls short in terms of collaboration security, data storage offering, video and audio conferencing quality, and overall solution’s price tag.

One of the key differences is storage space offered by both vendors. Google comes on top with no-nonsense 25GB per mailbox, and additional 10GB for files, Sites and web storage for the organization, plus an additional 500MB per user. For example, if you business consists of 10 employees, with Google Apps Premier Edition you will get:

• 25GB email storage per user, a total of 250GB
• 15GB file, sites (Google Sites), web and video storage

With Microsoft BPOS you will get:

• 1GB – 5GB email storage per user (Microsoft advertises 5GB mailbox with hosted Exchange only) configurable to up to 25GB
• 2.5GB file and site (hosted SharePoint) storage – aggregated, meaning that an administrator can allocate different amount of space on a per user account basis

Another major difference is the quality of audio and video conferencing. We have used and compared hosted Microsoft Live Meeting and Google Talk. While Microsoft Live Meeting offered more off the shelf features, both audio and video conferencing  was not a match for Google Talk. We have used Logitech QuickCam Pro 9000 web-cams. Google has done a wonderful job with a complete and seamless integration of the chat client with the email. The video is delivered encoded in Flash and looks smooth and crisp. We did not notice any lag for either video or audio while using Google Talk.

With Microsoft Live Meeting, both audio and video were the same quality as if we were using Windows Live Messenger or Skype. While video had a significant lag, audio was interrupted by some background noise, and a notable echo.

As for online collaboration, Microsoft does not offer real-time document editing unless you are using Live Meeting. Google Apps offers this feature off the shelf and provides a great collaborative environment, and extras that include coloured user name tabs within the document that allow you to quickly identify which user edits a parts of a document. In addition, the instant messaging is fully integrated within Gmail while working on the same document.

By default, Google Talk chat history is automatically saved under “Chats”, and is fully searchable. Users can always go “off the record” at anytime.

We offer complimentary copies of a complete document that includes Google Apps Premier vs. Microsoft BPOS Standard feature-for-feature comparison table. The analysis document is updated frequently. You can request your free copy by contacting us.

Until next time,

The Driz Group

*Any trademarks referenced in this document are the property of their respective owners.