At the recently held Microsoft Worldwide Partner Conference, Microsoft officials shared with attendees their “official” roadmap for updating the company’s hosted Business Productivity Online (BPOS) suite. Company officials shared which features and capabilities that the company rolled out already as part of the on-premises server complements of the BPOS products will be added to the Microsoft-hosted versions of those offerings.
Microsoft didn’t provide specific dates as to when they’d deliver the updates to each of its managed services, but did say the updates would happen in fiscal 2011 (which runs from July 1, 2010, to June 30, 2011).
According to Microsoft officials this week, here’s what’s coming on the Exchange Online front (from the WPC 2010 slide deck):
(click on the slide to enlarge)
Here’s what’s happening with SharePoint Online:
(click on the slide to enlarge)
The on-premise Office Communications Server 14 is likely to ship at the very the end of this year. Communications Online users won’t be getting these new OCS “14″ features for a number of months into 2011, I’d bet.
Here’s the new slide Microsoft showed this week at WPC ‘10, re: what’s coming, re: next-gen Communications Online features:
(click on the slide to enlarge)
What else is on tap for BPOS users? As Microsoft said last year the BPOS team will be phasing in over the coming months:
- Single Sign On with identity federation
- Redesigned User Interface (for the console)
- More administration and access control
- New markets and languages
- Enhance Syndication partner interface (”Syndication” is Microsoft’s program allowing mostly telco companies, but also some other partners to private-label its BPOS services.)