Category Archives: Office Communications Online

BPOS Tools site launched

A new website called BPOS Tools has been launched aimed at providing BPOS partners and customers with tools to improve their Microsoft Online Services experience.
A variety of software is currently available that ranges from file migration, monitoring, user management & maintenance, as well as end user usability functionality.
A couple of the key solutions that are beneficial to almost every full BPOS solution are:
- Password synchronisation
- Turning document libraries into email-enabled document libraries
- Migrating file systems to SharePoint Online
- Exchange Online monitoring (above and beyond the Microsoft Online Services Health Dashboard)

Have a look! More products and SharePoint web parts and templates coming soon.

New capabilities of Office Communications Online

I’m quite a fan of Office Communications Server (OCS) and have been for many years. So much so that I was one of the first 250 people in the world to be certified on it. While I love that Office Communications Online (OCO) gets the technology into more organisations I have been disappointed by the limitations imposed by having it hosted in the cloud. However with the release of Office Communications Server ’14′ impending, we will see some key functionality rolled out to OCO:

  • Audio/video across firewalls
  • File transfer across firewalls
  • Presence with pictures
  • Federation (!!!)
  • IM with Windows Live
  • Co-existence with OCS
  • Server-side IM archiving
  • Office Communicator is the unified client for conferencing (bye bye Live Meeting!)
  • Application & desktop sharing
  • Content presentation
  • Integration with 3rd party PSTN audio conferencing services
  • Client-side recording/playback

There are a few pieces of advanced unified communications functionality that will also be released, however these will only be available through select carriers and will have limited worldwide availability. In any case, these features are:

  • Single number for Office Communicator and your mobile phone
  • Common call controls
  • Unified voicemail

What’s coming in the next version of BPOS

A blog post from the Microsoft Online Services Team Blog:
http://blogs.technet.com/b/msonline/archive/2010/07/12/next-generation-bpos.aspx
Some of the exciting features are:

  • Office Web Apps (Word, Excel, PowerPoint, OneNote)
  • Exchange 2010 features (unified messaging, archiving, retention policies, transport rules, multi-mailbox search, free/busy between cloud & on-prem, native migration tools, remote PowerShell, etc.)
  • SharePoint 2010 features (portal site templates, extranet & anonymous access, Office 2010 integration, tagging and social networking, better search, improved features & functionality, Visio & Excel Services, sandboxed solutions, improved workflows, SharePoint Designer 2010 access, better control of FQDNs, etc.)
  • OCS 2010 features (P2P audio/video & file transfer across firewalls, presence with pictures, federation, IM with Windows Live)
  • General updates (single sign-on, identity federation, redesigned admin interface, more administration and access control)

Service descriptions for Microsoft Online Services (standard)

Microsoft last week released updated service descriptions for Microsoft Online Services which consolidate all of the relevant information into a few easy downloads. You can get access to these documents here: http://www.microsoft.com/downloads/details.aspx?displaylang=en&FamilyID=c60c0af0-10cc-4b11-bcef-b989c1f168b0
BPOS service descriptions

Mac + Exchange Online

The bloggers over at The Three UC Amigos have a great writeup of the Mac experience with Exchange Online.

I’ve tested it out myself using Mac Mail as well as Entourage – it works quite nicely. The only piece that I really missed about the Mac and BPOS solution is there is no Office Communicator interoperability, even using Mac Messenger. Maybe in the next release!