Office 365 enligt gartner ("Office 365" = BPOS = Microsofts molntjänst för bl.a. Mail)

Jag har tidigare skrivit lite om BPOS och Office 365. Det hela började väl egentligen när en kollega började tala om det för ett bra tag sedan.
Det var redan då det hette BPOS en intressant produkt. (BPOS står för "Business Productivite Online Suite") och denna har nu bytt namn till Office 365.
Det handlar i princip om att man köper en Mail lösning, en dokumenthanteringslösning och ett officepaket som en tjänst från Microsoft och att alla servrar och liknande sköts av Microsoft.
En så kallad "moln-lösning".

Som kund behöver man inte bry sig om det där med att byta trasig hårdvara, uppdatera servrar, sköta backupper osv. Det sker per automatik.
Dessutom är det enkelt att växa eller krympa sin lösning eftersom att man betalar per användare. Det är inte ens speciellt stora pengar det handlar om (beroende på vad man skall ha, men från 17kr per användare och månad. Vilket i princip knappt täcker licenskostnaderna).

Nåja, det finns så klart både fördelar och nackdelar med denna produkt, och självklart finns det konkurenter till Microsoft som också vill ha en bit av kakan.
Gartner har ju alltid rätt (eller i alla fall "rätt till en åsikt" :) och har nu publicerat en rapport om just Office 365.
Man skriver bland annat:
Overview:
With Office 365, Microsoft ushers in the second generation of its cloud collaboration services. The primary draw of its predecessor, Business Productivity Online Suite (BPOS), was the Exchange e-mail service, and we don't expect Office 365 to be any different. Organizations evaluating Office 365 must understand how the new Exchange Online version:

- Addresses previous shortcomings.
- Delivers a hybrid implementation.
- Supports BPOS migration.
- Is priced and packaged.
Key Findings
- Boiled down, Office 365 represents the migration of the 2007 version of the Microsoft collaboration suite to the 2010 versions of these products.
- Somewhat in response to the Google threat, Office 365 also includes two versions of Office — a Web-based version and an on-premises version maintained over the wire.
- We believe Office 365 is likely to be released in 2Q11 or 3Q11.
- Office 365 is the first wave of Microsoft collaboration products designed to be deployed on the Web, and hence should be far more substantial compared to BPOS.
Recommendations
- Organizations should be cautious with Office 365 since it represents — to varying degrees — fresh code being executed on an emerging cloud platform.
- Organizations should pay particular attention to the management and administration capabilities of Office 365 since those were the weakest elements of BPOS.
- Segmented user models (some users on lower priced options) and hybrid models (some mailboxes are on premises, and some are in the cloud) should be considered.
- Given the complexity, considerable time should be spent on scrutinizing the wide variety of licensing options for Exchange Online.

I sammanfattningen skriver man också:
The uptake of cloud e-mail services is in its infancy — and the platforms themselves are rapidly evolving. Vendors are figuring it out as they go along. Google — Microsoft's main rival in cloud e-mail — has been aggressively updating GAPE since the day it came out. Microsoft needed to get to market quickly and it knew that the Exchange 2007 platform was inadequate in many ways, but decided that an imperfect market presence was better than no presence. Plus, it always had the dedicated version of Exchange Online for large companies (25,000 plus, typically) which had much more mature management services.


But to a certain extent, Microsoft's true collaboration cloud initiative does not begin until it gets to the 2010 versions of Exchange, Lync and SharePoint. A successful transition to Office 365 will put tremendous pressure on Google, IBM and Cisco, both from a market presence perspective as well as the need to match efficient and effective management services. But a flawed transition and execution will put it at a significant competitive disadvantage. A successful transition will also position Microsoft to exploit a hybrid model where some mailboxes live in the cloud and others are on premises, which we believe will be an increasingly popular model.

Hela rapporten hittar man här: http://www.gartner.com/DisplayDocument?doc_cd=209483
eller som PDF: http://www.gartner.com/resources/209400/209483/office_365_the_exchange_impl_209483.pdf