Microsoft announce Exchange Online and SharePoint Online
Today’s big news is Microsoft’s announcement that they are planning to provide online, hosted, subscription-based versions of Microsoft Exchange and Microsoft SharePoint to organisations of all sizes. This is a big big step toward expanding their software plus services strategy. The new services are scheduled to be generally available to businesses of all sizes in the second half of the year.
Today, the sold-out first day of the SharePoint 2007 conference in Seattle, Microsoft announced these new hosted subscription-based services, and also the release of the Silverlight BluePrint for SharePoint and the general release of Microsoft Search Server 2008 Express.
SharePoint is just getting bigger and bigger. 3/4 of Fortune-100 organisations have now adopted SharePoint. It is Microsoft biggest, fastest selling server product today! It is the new de facto standard for enterprise collaboration, enterprise portal, enterprise search, enterprise content management, and enterprise social networking – all out-of-the-box!
Based on the proven, business-class software available in Microsoft Exchange Server 2007 and Microsoft Office SharePoint Server 2007, the new online services announced today enable businesses to access e-mail, calendaring, contacts, shared workspaces, and web-conferencing and video-conferencing over the Web. The new services are managed through a single Web-based interface, designed to meet the needs of IT professionals. Through this security-enhanced interface, IT professionals can monitor the performance of the services, add and configure users, submit and track support requests, and manage users and licenses.
Bill Gates said. “With Microsoft Online Services, businesses can deploy software as a subscription service, from servers they manage on-site, or a combination of the two, depending on their specific needs. In the future, customers and partners should expect to see this kind of choice and flexibility for all of Microsoft’s software and server products.”
The keynote of the conference can be seen here:
Video is well worth a watch, especially the second half which shows where the product is going to next!
It looks like SharePoint is just getting bigger and bigger… Microsoft have doubled their technical and implementation consultancy support for SharePoint and they intend to double it again within the next 6 months to try to keep up with the increase in customer demand….
Andrew Poots
