The following is a brief video presentation from IT Strategists on Microsoft Online Services Business Productivity Online Standard Suite (BPOS).

Transcript:
Hello and welcome to the IT Strategists presentation on Microsoft Online Services Business Productivity Online Suite. Some quick information about us, our company is a Microsoft Gold Certified Partner specializing in custom IT solutions tailored to meet the continuously growing and changing needs of businesses. Part of our goal in presenting this brief information on the BPOS suite is to empower businesses of all sizes to learn more about how improving business productivity through technology can be an inexpensive and rewarding investment.

If you’re not familiar with these technologies, this presentation will give you a quick overview with some key features, while delving into how businesses can improve productivity through implementing BPOS. You’ll also find out about how inexpensive this can be for budgets ranging from small businesses all the way to enterprise customers purchasing thousands of subscriptions.

First on the list to tackle is SharePoint, which is usually the more popular from among the online services, simply because collaboration and effective usage of resources can be such a time and money saver—and businesses are noticing it.

Having a single, integrated location to collaborate while effectively managing content and workflow cuts administrative costs while increasing work output. The central database of information and resources also is a great way to leverage business insight to empower the workforce to make better decisions through right information when and where it is needed. The wonderful aspect to right information at the right time is that it can be long-term information in the form of a team site for keeping content current and usable or it can be used for short-term team projects or meeting space for generating action items. There is so much that can be done to custom fit solutions for an enormous range of business needs.

There’s even the opportunity to partake in the Web 2.0 aspect through culminating knowledge and expertise into one central location in the form of a company Wiki. This is a great way to save on training costs through providing fresh, updated content which can be contributed to and edited by the workforce. Not to worry on the editing aspect though, because there is a handy versioning tool that makes sure you can roll back to a previous version if someone decides to delete part of a document that contained important information. And speaking of important information that brings us to our next topic on Exchange Server 2007 from the BPOS suite. Exchange server and SharePoint are usually the popular pairs in the BPOS, but the way the pricing works, if you get Exchange and SharePoint, you may as well get the whole suite because you’re going to end up paying less for the whole suite than you would for just Exchange and SharePoint together—sort of an incentive so that everyone will use all of the suite.

Still, Exchange is a great tool that businesses continue to want to use because anywhere access and security is a must-have for organizations seeking to grow and stay competitive—in any economy. On top of powerful spam blocker tools and other security features already included, the productivity power of Exchange is unsurpassed. Let your remote workers or traveling sales team respond to important emails or calendar changes through mobile devices or even calling into the Voice recognition system for Exchange Server. This is a great way to keep track of calendaring, arrange and on-the-fly meetings.

Speaking of meetings, what about Live Meeting? On top of being able to create on-the-fly or scheduled meetings, Live Meeting saves on travel expenses by allowing collaboration between dispersed colleagues. I mentioned the panorama in the video, which is in the Live Meeting Professional edition. Businesses are using Live Meeting to save money and create opportunities through holding online webinars, training sessions, and quick collaborations between colleagues needing to share ideas and form strategies quickly to stay competitive. And rather than just taking meeting notes, you can record the full interaction of the meetings to share with future audiences or archive for later reference.

Another popular feature are the Live Polls – so you can get on-the-spot statistics on how marketing campaigns are fairing or how many people in your webinar are already using a similar product or service you are offering. Interaction is a great way to engage audiences, especially if the meeting is going to be over an hour long. If you are not planning to meet for more than 15 to 20 minutes though, sometimes a less formal tool would work, which is the Office Communications Server, namely the Office Communicator R2 instant messaging service. Businesses are realizing the value of presence more and more as people need to more easily communicate when and how they would like to be communicated to. Microsoft Office Communications Server is a great investment since it integrates with existing programs and can bridge the gap between legacy software and other communications investments. You can say goodbye to VPN access too while you’re at it.

With presence and instant communication, you can easily let colleagues know when you’re working within a deadline, or when you need to collaborate with something you’re working on at the moment. Either way if you need to collaborate, you can do so with contacts already in your list, or with individuals looking for a quick and interactive sales presentation. It all depends on what you need, but the BPOS suite has something for every business, from small to enterprise.

Even the pricing is highly accessible. There is a 5 seat minimum for using online services, but for only $15 per month per user, you get all of the four services, Exchange Online, SharePoint, Office Communications Online, and Office Live Meeting. You can also buy them as standalone, so if you are just looking to get a new SharePoint portal, that is also available. An economy edition of the Deskless Worker suite, which has a limited version of Exchange and SharePoint also provides affordable online solutions for smaller businesses.