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:

High quality (750 kbps)

Medium quality (300 kbps)

Basic quality (100 kbps)

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….

Google Aps Vs Microsoft Office Infrastructure

There has been lots of hype since yesterday about the newly announced Google Sites being the death knell for Microsoft SharePoint… see headlines below:

• Google Goes After Another Microsoft Cash Cow
• Google Offers team Web Site Publishing Service
• Google Unveils Tools to Set Up Web Sites

Each of these articles tries to draw comparisons to Microsoft SharePoint and puts Google Sites forward as a valid contender. Complete Twoddle! I think this is total nonsense… Google Sites isn’t even in the same ball-park as SharePoint from a functionality perspective and I think the comparison is just a joke…

Google Sites only provides very simple web site creation… whereas SharePoint is a highly advanced web-based collaboration, portal, search, content management including MOD-compliant records management, business forms, business intelligence and application-hosting platform… the two pieces of software shouldn’t even be mentioned in the same sentence together!

SharePoint is huge and its usage has sky-rocketed over the last four years… it’s now the de facto standard for document management within the enterprise across virtually every industry sector… there’s no going back now… I’ll argue that Google Sites is simply too little too late within the enterprise space…

I’m not saying that Google Sites is bad… I actually think it’s a pretty good freebie for companies with really simple web-site and team-site needs… and I think it’s going to be hugely popular -  I just think the media hype about it bringing down SharePoint within enterprises is just silly…

The media would have us believe that Google, and their Google Aps suite is poised to shatter Microsoft’s dominance over corporate office and collaboration tools with a suite of disjointed online applications, the newest of which is Google Sites for creating business web sites and organisation team sites online, albeit free for base users, £25 approx per annum for corporate users who want extra features like storage space allowance and their own domain names etc.

Yes there is a huge business case for Google Apps… If I was starting a new company myself from scratch with no pre-existing infrastructure I’d be at Google’s front door with my cheque book with £25 per employee before I’d ever dream of trying to buy into Microsoft licenses for Active Directory, and Exchange and Office and SharePoint and all the rest of it…. and there are good examples of large corporate enterprise shifting in that direction, such as Proctor and Gamble for example!

Nevertheless I think the media underestimates the size of the battle ahead of Google in relation to trying to replace Microsoft Office within the enterprise.

First and foremost there is the will of average commercial Microsoft Office user… if you hadn’t noticed average user can’t be bothered with change that much… and they like the brand they know… like people who only buy Heinz beans… and Colgate toothpaste…

Second up, you’ve got all those ingrained system interfaces and Word/Excel report exports which companies have invested hugely in, all those Access databases interfacing onto back-office systems, all those highly customised word templates with the company logos embedded, all those Excel macros that grew up to be formalised business processes etc, etc. Office is everywhere within virtually every organisation. Sure Google Aps is as good as free, but the cost of trying to rip out Microsoft Office infrastructure for any sizeable company is just plain scary…

As well as this, I think it’s still going to be another couple of years before a lot of organisations really trust the likes of Google to host vast amounts of their corporate data…. especially when it’s not really clear where Google’s Service Level Agreements and Privacy Arrangements start and stop over your company’s data… I just don’t think they are an enterprise vendor yet….