Microsoft BPOS - News, Features, and Slideshows

Labour hire company, Chelgrave Contracting, has saved an estimated $100,000 in fuel and business costs after deploying Microsoft’s Business Productivity Online Standard Suite (BPOS).

Things will get rowdier for vendors of cloud collaboration, communication and office productivity applications now that Microsoft plans to unleash a take-no-prisoners assault on the market with Office 365.

The shortfalls of Google Apps will likely resonate with the inordinate amount of Microsoft shops in the industry. Years of investment in SharePoint developers, Exchange support teams and business processes built around the fickle aspects of Microsoft Office and its ribbon interface cannot be discarded easily. That’s ultimately where Microsoft’s strength is likely to reside. No matter when its Office 365 bundle is released, and despite numerous attempts to forge links between legacy applications and Google Apps, the complexity of a migration for a large organisation would likely be a headache most CIOs are eager to avoid. At least, that can be said for Coca Cola Amatil CIO, Barry Simpson.

Ultimately, some of the problems facing Microsoft’s Cloud strategy are those affecting many of its long-standing product suites. “Clearly Microsoft is trying to back-solve that problem to the legacy product set and clearly that’s problematic,” AAPT’s chief operating officer and effective CIO, David Yuile, says.

IT behemoths, Microsoft and Google, have for years been embroiled in battles over who would control the move by different industries to the Cloud. Since at least 2007, Australian universities and education authorities eager to outsource their email have turned to either provider in lieu of limited competition from the market. For the next battle, however, the stakes are higher. Both Google and Microsoft are betting all of their chips on a sector that is likely to prove much more lucrative than any before it: Enterprise.