Information is finally breaking out to the public about some of Microsoft’s new efforts to maintain it’s position as new approached to computing are gaining an accepted foothold.
To compete with Google Applications, Microsoft has the Business Productivity Online Suite. This is an online solution that includes:
- Microsoft Exchange Online
- Microsoft Office Live Meeting
- Microsoft Office SharePoint Online
- Microsoft Office Communications Online
This all comes in under the banner of Software Plus Services or Software + Services. You may know of "Software as a Service" or SaaS. MS sees SaaS purely as a delivery mechanism, i.e. how to make software available to customers. S+S is about wrapping services, e.g. customisation or management, of that software solution. It’s also location independent, e.g. in a MS data centre, a hosting partner’s data centre, on the customer’s site or even a hybrid. An interesting example of the hybrid solution is that some of an organisations mailboxes might be hosted by MS or a partner while the rest reside in a traditional on-site Exchange server.
The newest thing to break out is Microsoft Azure Services Platform. Azure is Microsoft’s platform for cloud computing. Cloud computing is where a solution lives out on the Internet and the consumer doesn’t care where. It is mobile; this gives the application fault tolerance of hardware, data centre and maybe even country! It’s available to try now as a Community Technical Preview (a pre beta release with no support).