Office 365 and BPOS

As managing vice president, Rob Helm covers Microsoft collaboration and content management. His 25-plus years of experience analyzing Microsoft’s technology... more

Office 365 is a set of service plans that combines the current versions of Microsoft-hosted online services (such as Exchange Online Standard) with optional subscription licenses to Office Professional Plus.

As of Oct. 2012, Office 365 included the following Microsoft-hosted services:

Exchange Online, powered by Exchange Server 2010
SharePoint Online, powered by SharePoint Server 2010
Lync Online, powered by Lync Server 2010.

For most customers, the services are offered in multitenant configurations, in which customers share physical servers and other resources. For large government and commercial customers, Microsoft also offers hosting on hardware dedicated to the customer.

Like the Business Productivity Online Suite (BPOS) that it replaced, Office 365 enables organizations to hand over deployment, management, and security patching to Microsoft for services such as e-mail, freeing up IT personnel for more important tasks. Office 365 cannot yet match servers deployed on-premises feature for feature, but each version reduces the feature gap. Office 365 also offers advantages that competitors such as Google or Zoho will find hard to match, such as easier migration from on-premises software and lower user training costs.

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