BPOS Registration

I now have access to BPOS thanks to two guys at Microsoft Support who had to manually provision the account for me. At least I can vouch for the effectiveness of the Support.

I suspect that the BPOS site has been built using MOSS with AJAX support (although I don't know this for sure). I know that the AJAX support in MOSS is new and generally regarded as a bit flakey by MOSS consultants I have spoken to.

I think that the data required for the online provisioning got corrupted during the registration process and meant that the online application could not complete the request and required manual intervention.

It took three days to get the service activated and then I had to get a password reset from support (which has to be done over the phone)! That happened pretty quickly. Once that was sorted I was in.

I am now going to have a crack at setting up the domain, registering some users and getting the SharePoint service working. I have spoken to another company who tried this, apparently they could not get the SharePoint service to work, but I don't know what the issue was. They gave up and moved their company onto Google.

First impressions are that Google Apps and BPOS are very different - the only thing they really seem to have in common is email and calendar and the two approaches to collaboration appear at first glance to be quiet different. I suspect that Corporate users are going to find BPOS more attractive at face value as it gives them the same experience as they are used to whereas Google presents a very different experience and requires a different way of thinking about how people work. This will be the biggest threat to Google once Microsoft finally get BPOS working properly.

I shall pick this up again next week and keep playing with it.

P.S. I am also in the process of getting my apps moved onto EC2, so I will post some observations on that platform here shortly.