Online vs. On-Premise Servers

Microsoft Online services offer a subset of the company’s on-premises products. Shown here are the three Microsoft Online Services, and some additional features available in the on-premises products but not in the online services. Notable omissions include the following:

• Communications Server Online does not offer voice/video conference calls or Web conferencing, (organizations can make one-to-one voice and video calls and can use the separate Live Meeting service for Web conferencing)
• Exchange Server Online does not offer unified messaging, which combines voice mail and e-mail in a single inbox.
• SharePoint Server Online does not offer enterprise search, which enables users to search files, e-mail, and application data with a single search query.

Some extra-cost online features are standard features in on-premise servers (such as Active Directory federation in Communications Server), and some standard online features cost extra in on-premise versions (such as Internet-based message filtering for Exchange Server). On the other hand, Exchange Server Online offers one service—BlackBerry support—that requires third-party software with the on-premise version of Exchange.