jim jacob

It’s been about 6 weeks since we have started using Microsoft’s Business Productivity Online Suite (BPOS), and I think it’s a good time to write down a few thoughts about our experience with the service. I’ve scoured the web for reviews when we were in our planning phase, and it was very difficult to find any real world reviews. I have had a couple of requests to describe our experience with BPOS, but I just haven’t had enough time to put down all my thoughts on paper. I hope to write more about our problems and solutions hopefully soon as well.

Let’s start with the good.

Support

I can’t praise the support reps enough that I have spoken to over the past few weeks. I haven’t had this great level of service from any other company before. The reps really went out of their way to help us as much as they could. Again, I can’t thank these guys enough for all their help. There is one caveat. Since this is still relatively a new service, they don’t have all the answers. That’s not their fault by any means, and I only expect it to get better as the service matures. Even when they didn’t have the answers, they went out of their way to help us during our migration and the issues we had afterwards.

Setup

Overall, the setup to get the migration and directory sync was relatively simple. First you have to decide whether you want to live in a coexistance mode vs. strictly using BPOS. Chances are that if you have Exchange on premise, you’ll spend some time living in co-existance mode before fully switching to BPOS. I’ll write about this in a separate entry.

Mailbox Sizes

Recently, Microsoft made a decision to increase everyone’s mailbox limit to 25GB. That doesn’t mean you have to give it all to your users, but it’s nice to know that we have space available if we need it. We don’t give our users the max size because that would mean more forwards and chain-letters stored in their inbox.

Now on to the not-so-good.

Service Uptime

Microsoft has published a RSS feed with notifications about the online services. When I first started going through the feed, I was worried. It seemed that every few days they had some issue affecting the mail servers. In fact, 3 weeks into our service, we had a downtime of almost 2 hours. The good news is that it didn’t affect all of our users. This can be both a good and bad thing depending on who you’re asking. Since I was on the server that went down, I wasn’t thrilled. We haven’t had any major issues since that event, and I expect the uptime to get better as they work out the kinks.

Ancillary Services

One thing we quickly learned after signing up with BPOS is that each piece of the puzzle is handled by multiple departments – 13 total from what I was told. For example, we have signed up to use the Exchange Hosted Archiving solution for our company. The service setup took much longer than expected. Once the order was put in, it took a few business days for the service to be activated. In fact, it’s been over 5 business days since we put in our request for email encryption and we still don’t have the service activated. One thing I want to point out is that this was made known to us from the very beginning. We knew going into this that the setup would not be quick. Once again, as the service matures, I expect this setup process to drastically reduce in time.

Final Thoughts

I am in no way regretting our decision to move to BPOS. If anything, I will miss having a local Exchange server to administer, but this does leave me some room to move on to other projects.

I cannot stress enough about the great support we have received from the reps. Even our rep for our Hosted Archiving has been nothing but helpful. They really have made the service a great experience. I hope that Microsoft commends them for their work.

Even though I have listed a couple of negative points here, I really don’t consider them that bad. I knew that this was a relatively new service and that we would experience a few bumps along the way. If you don’t have the patience to deal with minor bumps, then BPOS is not the service for you – at least not at this point in time.  This service will get better over time, but for now expect some bumps along the way.

If there is something specific you would like to know, please leave a comment. If I have any experience with it, I will be more than glad to let you know how it went.  I still have more to write about how we dealt with BPOS internally, but I’ll have to save that for another entry.

Taz is slowly waking up. Father mode ON.