Currently underway in the states is the Worldwide Partner Conference (WPC) for Microsoft partners. As you can imagine with the large push towards cloud computing from Microsoft, a great number of the announcements coming out of WPC are to do with Cloud Services.
For those of you that are already on BPOS or are mulling over the benefits of BPOS, the following link explains what is coming next and system requirements in detail. http://blogs.technet.com/b/msonline/archive/2010/07/12/next-generation-bpos.aspx
However, at a high level here are the new features which will be rolled out into BPOS later this year.
New Capabilities
Office Web Apps Updates
- Word Web App
- Excel Web App
- PowerPoint Web App
- OneNote Web App
Exchange Online Updates
- Voice mail with Unified Messaging
- Integrated archiving
- Retention policies and legal hold
- Transport rules
- Multi-mailbox search
- Conversation View
- MailTips
- Enhanced Web-based administration
- Role-Based Access Control
- Remote PowerShell
- Free/busy between cloud and on-premises
- Cross-premises management
- Native migration tools
SharePoint Online Updates
- Portal site templates
- Extranet access
- Anonymous Access
- Multi-Lingual UI
- Office 2010 integration
- Tagging, Rating, Tag Cloud
- Activity Feed, Social Networking, Note Board
- Improved Wikis & Blogs
- Content publishing
- Navigation controls
- Cross site-collection search
- Phonetic search
- People search
- Visio Services
- Excel Services
- Sandboxed Solutions
- Improved workflows
- Improved SharePoint Designer 2010
- Access Services
- Better controls of FQDNs
Office Communications Online Updates *
- P2P A/V across firewall
- File transfer across firewall
- Presence with pictures
- Federation
- IM with Windows Live
* Additional features will be available based on Communications Server “14” as part of ongoing service updates.
Platform Updates
- Free/Busy co-existence
- Single Sign On
- Identity federation
- Redesigned admin interface
- More administration and access control
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Very useful indeed! A simple list of the latest in BPOS – I’ll be retweeting this and using it as a reference.