Sharepoint Online News & Articles

With the popularity of SharePoint never really in question, the marketplaces for solutions and web parts is a natural occurrence. Here's one of the latest.

Productivity tools are a mainstay for every organization and Microsoft wants to ensure that everyone has a set of tools that both work well and are inexpensive to deploy. Today, Office365 has opened to public beta and based on what we've seen, there will be many lined up to the cloud to try it out.

Thanks to some storage efficiency improvements, Box.net (news, site) is benefiting from some economies of scale. Of course it wouldn't be fair not to share some of that good fortune, so Box has decided to pass it on to you.

If you weren't really sure if Microsoft was serious about their strong focus on the cloud, think again. With 40 million seats sold of BPOS (Business Productivity Online Services), Microsoft says their customers are embracing the cloud and it's only going to get better.

Microsoft's Business Productivity Online Suite (BPOS) (news, site) has just a nice new dashboard for monitoring the health of your service. 

It's Friday and I am in a Microsoft (news, site) state of mind. Particularly when it comes to news about SharePoint or cloud offerings like this one: Microsoft will offer governments a version of its Business Productivity Online Suite that more secure and private than the current one.

Want more proof that cloud computing is becoming very popular? Bamboo Solutions (news, site) has started up a new division focused on providing hosted solutions based on SharePoint.

The cloud is becoming a popular place, not everyone wants to deal with the licensing and deployment issues related to on premise solutions. Bamboo Solutions obviously sees an opening in the SaaS market that they can easily fill.

With SharePoint Online opening its doors to extensibility when it upgrades to SharePoint 2010, Bamboo has a potentially burgeoning market for its Web Parts, accelerators and applications. And there's room to develop even more. But that doesn't mean they should stop there.

The newly formed Bamboo Online Applications Group will develop and offer SharePoint based solutions themselves. The first of these Bamboo SaaS-based offerings will come sometime before the end of January in the form of collaboration solution. Called the Bamboo Requirements Manager (BambooRM™), it enables geographically dispersed teams to collaboration and communicate on demand.

Requirements Manager is just the start of a number of hosted solutions Bamboo will offer to small to medium sized businesses on a subscription basis. PMCentral, their flagship application, will also be offered as a hosted service at some point.

If you like SharePoint and you like the idea of someone else providing the application and platform for you, get ready to take Bamboo Online Applications for a trial run (they will offer trials).

A lot of people are waiting for the arrival of SharePoint 2010 (news, site) so they can officially get to work developing sites and applications. But along with a new version you can install and work with locally, the arrival of SharePoint 2010 also means changes for SharePoint Online.

Google Docs takes the next step towards becoming a true document management system. Google has just announced that it will start rolling out the ability for users to store documents of any file type within the system. And you won't have to convert your files to do it.

A great way to finish up my Friday. Taking a look at a third party SharePoint Multilingual Module. This one comes from a Quebec based company called AlphaMosaik.

Now we know that SharePoint 2007 offers us multilingual capabilities in the form of Variations, but this module goes farther, offering more languages and more functionality.

Seems increased competition with Google is making Microsoft look twice at its pricing for online services such as SharePoint (news, site) and Exchange.

The company has reduced the monthly rates for its Business Productivity Online Suite (BPOS) which includes SharePoint from US$ 15 to US$ 10. They also dropped the monthly subscription for Exchange Online from US$ 10 to US$ 5.

In addition to the price reduction, BPOS is also available in Singapore, and soon India. BPOS will be available in over 36 countries by the end of this year and there are a number of new high profile organizations using the service. Trials are slated to begin in Brazil, Chile, Colombia, Czech Republic, Greece, Hong Kong, Hungary, Israel, Malaysia, Mexico, Poland, Puerto Rico, Romania and Taiwan.

It's this adoption that is pushing the price of the online services down. According to Microsoft specifically, "“rapid customer adoption, global scale and improved efficiencies from new software such as Exchange Server 2010."

Microsoft is committed to adding new capabilities to the online services every 90 days. In October, they increased their support to 30,000 users and added some new admin capabilities.

At the SharePoint Conference, they also announced SharePoint Online for External Websites and are still working on pricing for Office Web Apps.

Is it all enough to take on Google and the increasing adoption of Google Apps for Business?

October is update month for SharePoint Online and there are a few new features that demonstrate Microsoft's desire to support larger organizations.