Why all this talk about Cloud Services

Thursday, November 20 2008 - Cloud Services

You might be asking questions like:

• I thought you liked SharePoint, why is there all of this talk about Online Servcies or Cloud Services?
• SharePoint is something I install in an Enterprise why would I care about services for Consumers?
• No company in their right mind would use Online Services, so what gives?

The short story is that if you are looking to move to Enterprise 2.0 or any type of social computing applications you *SHOULD* care.  If you are one of the people that are saying Online Services or Cloud Services don't matter for an Enterprise, then it might be time to open your mind a little and make sure you understand that even SharePoint can be avaliable online today.  SharePoint is avaliable in two forms for businesses.

• Small Businesses can use: Microsoft Office Live Small Business and Microsoft Office Live Workspaces beta
• Larger Businesses can use: Microsoft Online Services

Although these are some of the services avaliable for SharePoint, the number of Online Services continues to grow.  These services are like building blocks for your organization to allow them to plug and play components.  There are still some important items to think about when building your architecture.  The major pieces are security and permissions.  These are still items you will need to think about and determine how to handle even on an Online Service.

The longer story about why I keep talking about Online/Cloud Services is because I think that a part of the services are a critical component for the future.  They might not be ubiquoustly used today, but I think some of the components will be a part of many enterprise organazations in the future.  The days of building silos of information and products is over and it is time to have a good integration story for todays products as well as the products of the future that we don't even know about.  Online/Cloud Services are really just an extension of the focuses of Enterprise 2.0, SharePoint, and ASP.NET.  (obviously this is the Microsoft services) 

               

Comments

#1 John Ferringer on 11.20.2008 at 3:43 PM

Brendon --

I think you're a little off on your characterization of the various online services MS has rolled out recently...

The main thing is that all three of the items you outlined are *all* viable possibilities for small businesses, or businesses of any size for that matter. The area where they differentiate is in how they're intended to be used. Its frustrating, b/c MS seems to do a good job of making things confusing for ppl who want to use their products (see Vista licensing, WSS/MOSS, etc for examples).

MS Online Live Business, in my opinion, compares to a document library in SharePoint, or several of them grouped together. It's a online collaborative space for documents, allowing users to upload documents, version them, check them up, update them through a connected Office application, and move them from folder to folder. But that's about it. You don't get any of the other base functionality of SharePoint and its not customizable. You can't create other lists, assign tasks, keep a calendar, or other similar tasks. Its just for document collaboration and storage. (Keep in mind that this is based on my experiences this summer with the beta version, its been a little bit since I loved in and took a look at it.)

MS Online Live Workspaces is for the creation of a public-facing web presence for a business (website) and looks like it offers some light-weight CRM functionality. I don't have any experience with the product, but I don't think there's much of SharePoint in this offering.

MS Online Services is pretty cool stuff. Its hosted Exchange, SharePoint, Live Meeting, Office Commuications Server, and more. The solution is broken into two offerings: Shared and Dedicated.

Shared offers multi-tenant hosting of the Microsoft products listed above on Microsoft's servers, with attractive SLAs, support model, and disaster recovery. The products are available individually, or packaged together in a product called the Business Productivity Online Suite (BPOS), and are purchased on a per seat, per month basis. If you're a small to medium business, this is the communication/collaboration solution you're looking for from MS if you don't want to run your own infrastructure.

Dedicated is targeted at customers with 5,000 seats or more, running on hardware solely dedicated to the customer's solution. This is the solution that is targeted at larger, or Enterprise-level, businesses who don't feel comfortable sharing their resources with other customers.

Does that make sense?

John

#2 Brendon Schwartz on 11.20.2008 at 7:18 PM

@john what you said makes sense, but I think you are a little off in the Office Live Small Business offering. I think that OfficeLive offers much more than you have shown here and I think that the workspaces will offer many more options going forward.

Office Live Small Business offers a lot more than you have stated here and I will do a follow up post with some of the items you can do. Just to recap here are some of the features for small businesses. (keep in mind this isn't medium this is small)

* email

* contact manager

* web site

* online store and selling

* email marketing campaigns

* keyword advertising

* provides reports

* links to your office workspace

* In addition you can create your own Business Applications (SharePoint lists)

In the Business Applications (SharePoint lists) you can select one that has already been created or you can upload your own (.olp or .stp). For instance Matt and I have created a OneNote library. Check out his blog post for more info. (http://blogs.sharepointguys.com/matt/office/collaborate-over-the-internet-with-onenote-and-office-live/)

The real restriction today is the primary owner and the ability to skin the site. If you are willing to not worry about that you get a lot for a very low price and sometimes even FREE!

On the Office Live Workspace side they are still growing this area, but there are some amazing things coming in this space. The workspace is pretty much just a set of document libraries today. The big difference is that they allow you to comment on the workspace or see the current Activity. With the importance of activity streams today this is very important.

My suggestion is check it out, for companies that aren't looking to host the world and pay a lot for it these options are for them. For the larger companies you are right BPOS or a set of MS Online services would be right for them. Either way these services might form the basis for the architecture that you might build in the future and there will be more building blocks to come.

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