SharePoint Goes Online with new Services

By Barb Mosher (@barbmosher) Mar 5, 2008

At the SharePoint Conference 2008, Bill Gates shared some interesting news in his opening keynote. Of course he has lots to brag about when it comes to the great SharePoint machine — it reached 100 million licenses sold and surpassed sales of USD $1 billion this year.

So of course Microsoft would be planning even more solutions and capabilities that will encourage people to buy into the world of SharePoint. And it is becoming a world all on its own — just look at the number of vendors who are partnering to provide integrated solutions (2,250 to be exact).

So what’s new on the SharePoint collaboration front?

General Availability of Search Server 2008 Express

Out in beta since November 2007 – we gave you an overview of the free search product – MSSX is now generally available as a RTM.

Silverlight Blueprint for SharePoint

If you were wondering how to integrate Silverlight rich internet applications into your SharePoint sites, wonder no more. Microsoft is providing a Silverlight Blueprint for SharePoint that provides sample code, guidance and best practices, and rich business data visualization and interactivity for combining the two technologies.

There are a number of samples available now, but the Blueprint itself will be available on Codeplex in the coming months.

Expansion of Microsoft Online Services

Microsoft will offer a set of online services that should support companies of all sizes. A new licensing model that offers services on a per-user subscription basis is provided. Current customers with Software Assurance can purchase these per-user subscriptions at a discount.

There are four online services available either separately or as a suite:

SharePoint Online
Exchange Online
Office Communications Online
Office Live Meeting

SharePoint Online
SharePoint Online is a hosted SharePoint implementation that you can use for your organization instead of installing the product in-house.

SharePoint Online is available in two versions: Standard and Dedicated.

SharePoint Online Standard
This is the version most companies small to mid-size will likely use. It's a hosted version of SharePoint offering functionality such as Portal, Collaboration, Search, Content Management and Business Process Forms.

It contains all the standard templates for things like wikis, blogs and surveys and all the standard document and list library capabilities. Integration with Office, search, email alerts, offline access to documents from Outlook, RSS feeds, single-sign on and lots more.

This is a secure hosted environment using Microsoft Forefront anti-virus scanning. It has a 99.9% availability with financially backed Service Agreements. Web and phone based support are included for Tier 2 support for IT Administrators.

Standard Parameters include:

Unlimited number of Sites (based on space limit)
250 MB per user
Secure via Https
Single Sign-on using Sign In Tool
Business continuity and disaster recovery
Per user per month fee
Supports IE6+ and FireFox 2.0+

SharePoint Online Dedicated
The dedicated version of SharePoint Online is a completely separate hosted version for a company. They host their own implementation (separate server environment including servers, networks and physical space) in Microsoft's data centres.