by host

It’s no secret that we feel strongly about our ability to lead the market for cloud productivity applications. So with every new customer that choses our services – big or small, in government, education or otherwise – it reinforces to us that we’re doing our job. Last week we announced the State of Minnesota as the first U.S. state to move to their e-mail and collaboration to the cloud with BPOS – all 33,000 employees. Today, we are excited to welcome a host of new companies and schools to the cloud. DuPont (a Fortune 500 company), Godiva (yes the chocolatier), Spotless Group (an Australian company in facilities and assets management) and Sunoco (a leading manufacturer of petro-chemical products) have joined the thousands of new BPOS customers. Also announced today is Volvo Car Corporation – based in Sweden, the company has decided to deploy BPOS for all 18,000 users to help drive productivity and keep costs down. In the last year, the number of businesses on BPOS has more than tripled, and while we’re always working to get better, we hope this endorsement means we’re getting a few things right.

Read more about DuPont, Spotless Group, Sunoco and Volvo here. Read Godiva Chocolatier’s case study here and how their migration from Lotus Notes to BPOS is saving them $250,000 annually. The company said something we are hearing a lot about these days - that employees are happier and more productive now that they can use familiar software like Office together with BPOS. You can also read more about the partner that helped Godiva and other BPOS customers with similar Notes-to-BPOS migrations – Binary Tree – in their special guest blog today.

In other cloud news, universities worldwide are going back to school this year with Live@edu, our cloud suite for students. School budgets are tight as ever, and with Live@edu, schools are saving money while still providing world-class technology. Universities announced today include a slew of California schools – San Francisco State University, Long Beach State University, California State Polytechnic University at Pomona, and the State Center Community College District – as well as University of Montana, Washington University in St. Louis, Northern Kentucky University (read case study here), College of DuPage and Aston University in the United Kingdom. Read more here about Aston’s decision to choose Live@edu over other cloud-based alternatives. Best of luck to these universities for a great school year, and welcome to Microsoft’s cloud!

by host

Binary Tree is the world's leading provider of cross-platform messaging migration and coexistence software and a Microsoft Certified Gold Partner. Since 1993, Binary Tree and its business partners have helped over 5,000 customers around the world to migrate more than 20,000,000 users. In this guest blog, Binary Tree Co-CEO Henry Bestritsky offers insight about the company’s decision to exit Google’s Partner program and direct all resources to Microsoft's on-premises and cloud based solutions for Exchange and SharePoint.

We have announced our decision to stop marketing our CMT for Google Apps email migration product and are retiring from the Google Enterprise Partner program after months of market evaluation, customer feedback and an overwhelming global demand for BPOS migrations versus Google Apps. The feedback received to date tends to be centered on a few key themes – concerns regarding limited functionality, data privacy and the security standards offered by Google Apps. With more and more companies looking to maximize their IT spend, something we heard time and again from customers of all sizes is that they are not willing to accept less functionality just to save money. They want something that’s familiar to users and provides full-featured email, calendaring and collaboration – something that Google Apps wasn’t delivering. Customers such as Godiva Chocolatier have stated they are choosing BPOS over Google Apps because of the email and calendaring differences. With Exchange, end users can rely on the familiarity of Outlook as their preferred email client without sacrificing functionality and integration with other line of business applications.

Customer concerns over security and privacy was another key reason for our decision. Any company that is considering a transition to the cloud needs assurances that their data is protected and secure. This is particularly true in Europe where we received a number of complaints that Google’s hosted solutions could not provide the security and privacy measures required by law. Microsoft is already meeting these rigorous privacy and security standards and solutions which is why we’ve seen such strong demand for both its online and on premises offerings.

Finally, the uncertainty many of our customers expressed about Google’s long term roadmap helped to solidify our decision to divest from the partnership. Several of them were put off by the guessing game they were forced to play in order to anticipate things such as Google feature adds, product strategy and investment areas. This alone prevented many from even considering Google.

Coca-Cola Enterprises, Dow Chemical, Ingersoll Rand and many more have chosen Binary Tree to help them make the move to Microsoft. It all boils down to customer demand. If our customers want to migrate to Microsoft’s cloud services then we are going to do whatever we can to help them get there. We feel strongly that Microsoft is the best choice – hands-down.

by host

This week in BPOS news is a recurring segment on the Microsoft Online Services Team Blog that covers news from all sectors of Cloud Computing and the Microsoft Online Services business suite known as the Business Productivity Online Suite (BPOS). You can read all past This Week in BPOS News segments here.

For this week in BPOS news we cover two huge stories that include a historic cloud move from the 12^th largest state in the U.S., and a highly anticipated BPOS feature release.

1. Minnesota moves e-mail to Microsoft's cloud

This has been an exciting week for Microsoft Online Services and BPOS. The first major announcement this week came from the great state of Minnesota. Minnesota is known for Twin Cities, Bob Dylan and will now also be known as the “first U.S. state to move to a large collaboration and communication suite in a private cloud environment.” We first published this story on our team blog and ComputerWorld takes another look at this historic cloud migration in their article entitled Minnesota moves e-mail to Microsoft's cloud.

The article from ComputerWorld outlines the recent history of U.S. cities and states moving to cloud computing. The piece touches on Minnesota’s lengthy search for the best cloud provider.

Minnesota's decision follows an 18-month project to consolidate some 30 messaging environments, which included GroupWise and Lotus Notes, as well as multiple Microsoft Exchange versions, to a single Exchange platform. Now the applications will move to the cloud via Microsoft's Business Productivity Online Suite.

This article also touches on some of the reasons why Minnesota decided to move to the cloud. The main reason for the move is for “cost savings.” You can read more about Minnesota’s monumental move to the cloud. What are your thoughts about this move? Would you like to see more government move to cloud? We want to hear from you in the comments section below.

2. Microsoft Launches Status Dashboards for BPOS

Microsoft BPOS runs in the cloud and off of locally controlled servers. The convenience of not having to worry about local outages or server updates brings many users to the cloud with Microsoft BPOS. The one irritation that customers have about not obtaining physical control over servers is the lack of visibility into cloud updates and downtimes. Earlier this week we remedied this problem by announcing the Introduction of the Microsoft Online Service Health Dashboard. PC World takes a second look at our announcement in their blog post. PC World mentions how this health dashboard will provide more data about Microsoft’s cloud which will remedy many IT issues.

Knowing the severity, scope and nature of the service interruption, along with estimates on when the issue might be fixed, allows IT administrators to relay that information to their end users and keep them updated on the progress to fix the outage.

If you want another perspective and more information about the Health Dashboard, Mary Jo Foley covers it in her story “Is Microsoft BPOS Down? Check the new dashboard.”

What do you think of the Health Dashboard? Leave your comment below.

What are your thoughts about the stories we shared with you this week? Did you see a story you want to share with us? Let us know what other topics you’d like to see. You can comment on this blog post or send an email to our community mailbox. Follow us on Twitter and like our Facebook page.

by host

As I mentioned in my previous post, the mission of my team is to make sure that BPOS customers have a great experience with our services. Since writing my first post for this Team Blog, I have talked with a number of customers and followed your comments closely. One theme that has carried through – both in past and more recent conversations – is the desire of our customers to have more detailed information about the status of their services. 

Today, we’re taking a step forward in delivering more timely, accurate and targeted information about BPOS service status by introducing the Microsoft Online Service Health Dashboard.  It is designed to provide a greater level of information regarding the status of all services and tools, and it includes information about current service status as well a 35-day status history.

Accessing the Service Health Dashboard

There are separate Service Health Dashboard for each of our three data center regions: Americas, serving customers in North America and Latin America (NOAM); Europe, the Middle-East and Africa (EMEA); and Asia-Pacific (APAC).

Administrators can navigate to their regional Service Health Dashboard using one of the following URLs; administrators then use their normal BPOS credentials to access the Dashboard:

Using the Service Health Dashboard

Upon logging into the Service Health Dashboard, administrators are presented with the status of the current day and week for all BPOS services.  The status for each service or tool represented in the Service Health Dashboard is represented by one of four icons, each representing a different level of service availability:

Current day status displays the status as of the last login or page refresh. The historical status displays the greatest level of service degradation for the given day. The Additional Information, Performance Degradation, and Service Interruption icons are clickable, providing drilldown information about service status the given service and day. Clicking the Previous Week link allows administrators can navigate to historical service status for preceding weeks.

With all improvements to BPOS, we’re trying to increase our timeliness, accuracy and granularity of information.  I encourage every administrator to poke through the site and provide us with feedback regarding usage and improvements.  We hope the service health dashboard gives you confidence that we take information regarding status very seriously, and that you can stay ahead of questions from your own internal customers and users. 

As always, if you are experiencing service issues or have questions about the Service Health Dashboard, 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.

by host

Great news today as the State of Minnesota moves to the cloud with BPOS. Today, the state issued a press release announcing  this “groundbreaking enterprise-wide service agreement.” Read more about this “historic cloud computing agreement” on the Bright Side of Government blog and learn how “the move makes Minnesota the first U.S. state to move to a large collaboration and communication suite in a private cloud environment.”

The state chose BPOS to save money, expand capabilities, and improve operational efficiency for as many as 33,000 state users. The new BPOS services will:

• Allow seamless migration from existing IT resources, because BPOS leverages familiar technologies.
• Require little retraining of state employees, limiting service disruption, because BPOS already works with Office.
• Enhance security for sensitive state data because BPOS is built from the ground up for security and privacy.
• Extend enterprise-class services with advanced functionality because BPOS is based on the most popular productivity platform in the world.
• Contribute to significant cost savings by working within existing partner agreements because BPOS has the most expansive and best trained partner ecosystem for the cloud.

Welcome to the cloud Minnesota!