Todd Kitta with
Covenant presented BPOS and SharePoint. He started by telling us that BPOS is hosted Microsoft products in Microsoft's data centers. Business Productivity Online Standard Suite is dedicated to under 5,000 seats but it will scale up to 100,000. Energizer is a very early adopter of the dedicated technology but other companies on standard include Nokia, Philips, and Coca Cola. Within the logos, Todd Kitta pointed out that SharePoint saved the Maersk captain. Albeit, it was a customized application but he couldn't resist pointing out that Maersk is using BPOS.
Todd said that his company is on Exchange Online and he even uses it on his iPhone. Other products include Live Meeting, Office Communication Online (OCS), and SharePoint Online Standard (SOS). Finally, all the acronyms at SharePoint conventions make sense! Benefits include Single Sign On, integration with other applications, https, data protection, availability and geo-redundancy with data centers in places like Singapore, Netherlands, and Texas. There is no central admin - while some of the functionality is replicated in the environment, it is something to consider as you weigh the needs of your organization.
The pricing comes out to $15 per user each month for a five person minimum. One participant said that something like this could even meet the needs of families trying to stay in touch with one another. Watch out
ancestry.com, BPOS is coming for you.