Category Archives: microsoft

cloud computing, internet, microsoft, professional, software development

Microsoft partners are not whooping and cheering for Office 365

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There is a telling moment in the day two keynote at Microsoft’s Worldwide Partner Conference. “Now we’ve added Office 365”, says Corporate VP Jon Roskill. Do you guys feel the momentum?” There is a muted cheer, not the big whoop Roskill is looking for. “Now let’s have some momentum, whoo!” he repeats. Another barely audible cheer.

Why are partners not whooping and cheering?  Take a look at the Microsoft-commissioned Forrester report [PDF] on the total economic impact of Office 365. This report claims a remarkable payback period of only 2 months for a midsize organization moving to Office 365.

Looking at the figures in more detail, Forrester claims $54,000 saved over three years in eliminated hardware, $10,000 over the period in eliminated third-party software, $25,000 saved in web conferencing (Lync Online is bundled with Office 365), and $18,000 in “internal labor and professional services” saved on planning and implementation. There is an even bigger saving in support. Here I find it hard to puzzle out exactly what Forrester is claiming. It talks about “savings of $206,350 over three years” from simplified support and outsourced administration of infrastructure, but also refers to $146,250 costs in admin and support costs for Office 365; I am not sure if the $206,350 is a net figure. Forrester also throws in $260,625 saved on reduced travel thanks to online collaboration, which strikes me as highly speculative.

I suggest therefore that you do not take Forrester’s figures too seriously; but it is still worth noting that many of the savings come from revenue that would otherwise have gone to partners. How much partner income is lost will depend on the extent to which an organization outsources its IT admin, planning, support and administration, and on the margins partners achieve on things like third-party software; but it is considerable.

Of course there are also new business opportunities for partners. Presuming the savings from Office 365 and Microsoft’s other cloud offerings are real, a cloud-oriented partner has a strong sales pitch both to existing and new customers. Partners get an ongoing commission from subscriptions.

There is also an opportunity for new applications which link to cloud services. Yesterday Microsoft announced that the Windows Azure Marketplace, which used to offer data services and application building blocks, now also offers finished applications in US markets.

It is also true that Microsoft’s cloud offering is more partner-friendly than others, because it is a hybrid solution. Forrester’s report mentioned above assumes use of Active Directory Federation Services for single-sign on between on-premise and Office 365, a key feature which has been under-reported in the media coverage I have seen for Office 365. This feature, along with the fact that Microsoft’s server products like Exchange, SharePoint and Dynamics CRM can be deployed either online or as hosted services, means that there is flexibility over what is hosted and what is on-premise.

Nevertheless, it is hard to construct a reality in which the savings customers get from cloud services are real, without the further implication that total partner revenue will diminish, even though certain individual partners who take advantage of the new opportunities may end up winners.

This is true even if Microsoft succeeds in retaining all of its existing Microsoft-platform customers, rather than losing them to Google or other cloud providers. The consequences of a migration to Google, which is inherently not a hybrid platform, seem to me more severe.

Is there any way to put a positive spin on this, from a partner’s perspective? A couple of thoughts on this.

First, even if certain kinds of IT business are under threat from cloud migration, it is also true that the transforming impact of IT and the internet on businesses is far from complete. Much of what businesses currently do with IT can be greatly improved, there is still a thirst for new and improved business applications, and new technology including not only the cloud, but also massively parallel computing and of course mobile presents many new opportunities.

Second, it seems to me that partners should not be asking themselves how to maintain their business, but instead planning for change. It seems to me inevitable that the demand for skills in installing and nursing servers, deploying applications, and in maintaining and supporting clients, will diminish; and that is a good thing because these activities are IT plumbing and if they can be reduced it frees resources for other activities which have more business potential.

Behind the whooping and cheering, Microsoft’s message to partners is a tough one. Change, or die.

google, microsoft, Web

Google+, Bing social search, and internet monopolies

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The big new thing in social media right now is Google+, the search giant’s latest attempt to grab a slice of the social internet from Facebook and Twitter.  I have been trying it for a few days and like everyone else have enjoyed playing with circles, the ability to categorise contacts into groups and choose who you sharing with. I like that it addresses a core issue, the fact that we want to share different things with different people, but dislike the added complexity. In practice, if I have a personal message I am likely to use email or some other form of direct messaging, whereas what I post on a social networking site I will likely address to everyone.

Still, Google+ is a decent effort, and irrespective of how it compares in detail to its rivals, I think it may take off simply because Google has other properties, specifically Google search and Google Android, which will point you to it.

The value of social networks to a search company was highlighted this week, not by Google but by Microsoft at its Worldwide Partner Conference. The opening keynote was short on big news, but did include a demo of new features in Bing, that other search engine.

Stefan Weitz Director of Influentials, showed how Bing can interact with Facebook so that you search results are annotated with the preferences of your friends. Here, Weitz has searched for “Mango” and Bing shows a section of results marked as Liked by your Facebook friends:

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He then searches for Hawaii hotels for kids and sees this:

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Once again, he sees two of his own contacts who have Liked a specific web site. He can go to the site with more confidence, or even click the name to interact directly with his contact and find out more.

This is powerful stuff, though the examples are contrived, and this is only going to work if you and your contacts do many of the same searches with the same search engine. The Microsoft/Facebook alliance has an advantage over Google in that Facebook has a bigger and more mature social graph; but Google has the advantage of a far larger search share, especially outside the USA. On this site, for example, here are the figures for July:

  • Google 90%
  • Bing 3.7%
  • Yahoo! 3.4%

You can figure out how much that leaves for “Other”.

Another Bing move also merits reflection. Weitz went on to demonstrate how Bing wants to you to do the transaction as well as the search on its portal. It is actually fine for Bing to do this with its small market share; but I am not sure that I like the implications for search in general.

This hints at my central concern, which is monopoly. One reason I like Twitter is that I have no sense that Twitter wants to take over my digital life. I know Google does; it wants my searches, my email, my documents, my music, my location, and now my friends.

I know Facebook wants a big slice of it too; it wants me to live inside its walled garden.

These thoughts chime for me with another incident from the last few days. I posted something  for sale on eBay, the dominant online auction site, and found that it has notched up its terms and conditions with me further in its own favour by insisting that I set up automatic payment of its fees before it would allow me to post the item. It also happens that PayPal, owned by eBay, has recently sent me a notice advising that it is restricting the number of sales that can be funded by credit card, I presume because it dislikes the consumer protection gained by buying by credit card.

The connection here is that eBay and PayPal only have the liberty to make these unilateral changes in their terms because of lack of competition. Yes, there are other online markets; but if you actually want to sell stuff, there is little real-world choice. Well, there is Amazon; and there is another organisation which, for all its many merits, is constantly extending its reach.

It is curious in a way, that when the web first appeared it seemed to be a great opportunity for the little guys – because on the Internet, nobody knows you’re a dog – but what we are now seeing is that winner-takes-all applies to a degree which goes beyond anything in the bricks and mortar world.

.net, cloud computing, microsoft, professional, software development, visual studio, web authoring, windows

Hands on debugging an Azure application – what to do when it works locally but not in the cloud

I have been writing a Facebook application hosted on Microsoft Azure. I hit a problem where my application worked fine on the local development fabric, but failed when deployed to Azure. The application was not actually crashing; it just did not work as expected. Specifically, either the Facebook authentication or the ASP.NET Forms Authentication was failing; when I tried to log on, the log on failed.

This scenario, where the app works locally but not on Azure, is potentially a bad one because you do not have the luxury of breakpoints and variable inspection. There are several approaches. You can have the application write a log, which you could download or view by using Remote Desktop to the Azure instance. You can have the application output debug messages to HTML. Or you can use IntelliTrace.

I tried IntelliTrace. It is easy to set up, just check the box when deploying.

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Once deployed, I tried the application. Clicked the Log On button, after which the screen flashed but still asked me to Log On. The log on had failed.

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I closed the app, opened Server Explorer in Visual Studio, drilled down into the Windows Azure Compute node and selected View IntelliTrace Logs.

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The logs took a few minutes to download. Then you can view is the IntelliTrace log summary, which includes a list of exceptions. You can double-click an exception to start an IntelliTrace debug session.

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Useful, but I still could not figure out what was wrong. I also found that IntelliTrace did not show the values for local variables in its debug sessions, though it does show exceptions in detail.

Now, if you really want to debug and trace an Azure application you had better read this MSDN article which explains how to create custom debugging and trace agents and write logs to Azure storage. That seems like a lot of work, so I resorted to the old technique of writing messages to HTML.

At this point I should mention something you must do in order to debug on Azure and remain sane.  This is to enable WebDeploy:

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It is not that hard to set up, though you do need to enable Remote Desktop which means a trip to the Azure management portal. In my case I am behind a firewall so I needed to configure Web Deploy to use the standard SSL port. All is explained here.

Why use Web Deploy? Well, normally when you deploy to Azure the service actually builds, copies and spins up a new virtual machine image for your app. That process is fundamental to Azure’s design and means there are always at least two copies of the VM in existence. It is also slow, so if you are making changes to an app, deploying, and then testing, you will spend most of your time waiting for Azure.

Web Deploy, by contrast, writes to your existing instance, so it is many times quicker. Note that once you have your app working, it is essential to deploy it properly, since Azure might revert your app to the last VM you created.

With Web Deploy enabled I got back to work. I discovered that FormsAuthentication.SetAuthCookie was not working. The odd thing being, it worked locally, and it had worked in a previous version deployed to Azure.

Then I began to figure it out. My app runs in a Facebook canvas. Since the app is served from a different site than Facebook, cookies may be rejected. When I ran the app locally, the app was in a different IE security zone, so different rules applied.

But why had it worked before? I realised that when it worked before I had used Google Chrome. That was it. IE worked locally; but only Chrome worked when deployed.

I have given up trying to fix the specific problem for the moment. I have dug into it a little, and discovered that cookie handling in a Facebook canvas with IE is a long-standing problem, and that the Facebook C# SDK may have bugs in this area. It is not essential for my sample; I have found I can get by with the Facebook session. To get the user ID, for example:

FacebookWebContext.Current.Session.UserId

The time has not been wasted though as I have learned a bit about Azure debugging. I was also amused to discover that my Azure VM has activation problems:

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internet, microsoft, professional, software development

Internet Explorer 10 Platform Preview 2 gets web workers, HTML5 sandbox

Microsoft has released Internet Explorer 10 Platform Preview 2 which adds a number of features. These include:
  • Web Workers for background JavaScript.
  • File Reader API
  • HTML 5 drag and drop
  • CSS3 positioned floats
  • HTML 5 sandboxing
  • Some features of HTML 5 forms
I asked Microsoft’s Ryan Gavin and Rob Mauceri why IE seems so far behind its rivals in HTML 5 support if you look at a test site such as html5test.com, where IE9 scores 141 and Google Chrome 329. I was given several reasons. The site does not cover CSS3, SVG, yet does include “specs that are still under development, specs that have been superseded by other things, you have look at what it is actually testing,” said Mauceri. He added that the site only tests for the existence of the feature rather than how well it is implemented.
Fair points, but my sense is that Microsoft, while hugely ahead of where it used to be in terms of HTML standards support, is likely behind Google and Mozilla and likely to remain so. Microsoft has a slower release cycle, and a greater burden of legacy issues to worry about.
That said, Microsoft is pushing forward energetically compared to pre-IE9 days and the new features are interesting, particularly in the light of the greater role of HTML5 which has been promised for Windows 8.
Web Workers, for example, enables more responsive web pages through concurrent programming.
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I also asked how Microsoft will enable greater access to the Windows API in Windows 8 without polluting the standards, but got the non unexpected answer “wait for the Build conference”.
No formal word on timing, but I would expect the delivery of IE10 and Windows 8 to be connected.
.net, azure, cloud computing, microsoft, professional, sharepoint, software development, visual studio, web authoring, windows

Microsoft Office 365: the detail and the developer story

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I attended the UK launch of Office 365 yesterday and found it a puzzling affair. The company chose to focus on small businesses, and what we got was several examples of customers who had discovered the advantages of storing documents online. We were even shown a live video conference with a jerky, embarrassing webcam stream adding zero business value and reminding me of NetMeeting back in 1995 – which by the way was a rather cool product. Most of what we saw could have been done equally well in Google Apps, except for a demo of the vile SharePoint Workspace for offline editing of a shared document, though if you were paying attention you could see that the presenter was not really offline at all.

There seems to be a large amount of point-missing going on.

There is also a common misconception that Office 365 is “Office in the cloud”, based on Office Web Apps. Although Office Web Apps is an interesting and occasionally useful feature, it is well down the list of what matters in Office 365. It is more accurate to say that Office 365 is for those who do not want to edit documents in the browser.

I am guessing that Microsoft’s focus on small businesses is partly a political matter. Microsoft has to offer an enterprise story and it does, with four enterprise plans, but it is a sensitive matter considering Microsoft’s relationship with partners, who get to sell less hardware and will make less money installing and maintaining complex server applications like Exchange and SharePoint. The, umm, messaging at the Worldwide Partner Conference next month is something I will be watching with interest.

The main point of Office 365 is a simple one: that instead of running Exchange and SharePoint yourself, or with a partner, you use these products on a multi-tenant basis in Microsoft’s cloud. This has been possible for some time with BPOS (Business Productivity Online Suite), but with Office 365 the products are updated to the latest 2010 versions and the marketing has stepped up a gear.

I was glad to attend yesterday’s event though, because I got to talk with Microsoft’s Simon May and Jo Carpenter after the briefing, and they answered some of my questions.

The first was: what is really in Office 365, in terms of detailed features? You can get this information here, in the Service Description documents for the various components. If you are wondering what features of on-premise SharePoint are not available in the Office 365 version, for example, this is where you can find out. There is also a Support Service Description that sets out exactly what support is available, including response time objectives. Reading these documents is also a reminder of how deep these products are, especially SharePoint which is a programmable platform with a wide range of services.

That leads on to my second question: what is the developer story in Office 365? SharePoint is build on ASP.NET, and you can code SharePoint applications in Visual Studio and deploy them to Office 365. Not all the services available in on-premise SharePoint are in the online version, but there is a decent subset. Microsoft has a Sharepoint Online for Office 365 Developer Guide with more details.

Now start joining the dots with technologies like Active Directory Federation Services – single sign-on to Office 365 using on-premise Active Directory – and Windows Azure which offers hosted SQL Server and App Fabric middleware. What about using Office 365 not only for documents and email, but also as a portal for cloud-hosted enterprise applications?

That makes sense to me, though there are still limitations. Here is a thread where someone asks:

Does some know if it is possible to make a database connection with Office365, SharePoint (Designer) and SQL Azure database ?

and the answer from Microsoft’s Mark Kashman on the SharePoint team:

You cannot do this via SharePoint Designer today. What you can do is to create a Silverlight or javaScript client application that calls out to SQL Azure.

In the near future, we are designing a way to make these connections using the base SharePoint technology called BCS (Business Connectivity Services) where then you could develop a service to service to SQL Azure.

If you cannot wait, check out the Cloud Connector for SharePoint 2010 from Layer 2 GmbH.

It seems obvious that Office 365 and Azure together have potential as a developer platform.

What about third-party applications and extensions for Office 365? This is another thing that Microsoft did not talk about yesterday; but it seems to me that there is potential here as well. It is not well integrated, but you can search Microsoft Pinpoint for Office 365 applications and get some results. If Office 365 succeeds, and I think it will, there is an opportunity for developers here.

cloud computing, microsoft, professional

Office 365 and why it will succeed

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Today is launch day for Microsoft’s Office 365, which offers use of Exchange, SharePoint and Lync hosted by Microsoft at commodity prices – not quite as low as $50 per user per year for Google Apps, but low enough that it is likely to be a substantial saving for most customers, versus the cost of installing, maintaining and backing up on-premise versions of the same software.

The debate about the merits of Office 365 versus Google Apps is a fascinating one, but the reality is that many organisations are not ready to give up Word and Excel, Outlook and Active Directory. Why?

  • They are too deeply invested in Microsoft’s platform, and depend on home-grown and/or third-party applications that run on it.
  • Office and Exchange is a business standard.
  • Desktop applications still have advantages for things like word processing or manipulating large spreadsheets.
  • Offline is important, and Microsoft is better at this than Google.
  • Microsoft ticks boxes in areas like compliance and archiving

The beauty of Office 365 is that migration from on-premise servers can be almost invisible to users. It is also an easy and effective solution for new businesses. Every mobile device seems to support Exchange, and one thing it has always done well is to synchronise nicely with multiple clients.

The other side of the coin is that Google Apps is by far the better option if you want to live in the cloud. Outlook Web App is not bad, but creating and editing documents entirely with Office Web Apps would not be fun at all. Office 365 will also be a struggle if you are inclined to ditch Windows. Email will be OK, and I guess Mac users have Office 2011, though in my experience that is inferior to almost any version of Office on Windows.

What about the really interesting questions? Is data more secure with Google, or with Microsoft? Is either platform resilient enough to manage without backups? What is the risk of extended downtime that could have a drastic impact on productivity?

Unfortunately it is not possible to offer precise answers to these questions, which I guess is why on-premise retains its appeal.

adobe, bbc, flash, microsoft, professional, security

IE9 ActiveX Filtering causing tears of frustration

I have been assisting a friend who, she told me, could not get BBC iPlayer to work. Further, another site was telling her she did not have ActiveX, but she was sure she had it.

This was puzzling me. She described how she went to the BBC iPlayer site, and it said she needed to install Flash.

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She clicked the link and got to Adobe’s download site. She clicked Download now and got a page describing four steps to install, but nothing happened, no download.

She clicked Adobe’s troubleshooting guide, which took her through uninstalling Flash Player and then a manual download. All seemed to work but at the end of it, it was the same. Go to the BBC site, and be told to install Flash Player.

You can understand how computers, at times, can seem downright hostile to the long-suffering user.

What was the problem? I logged on with remote assistance. Somehow, IE9 had ActiveX Filtering enabled.

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This is actually a great security feature. ActiveX is disabled on all sites by default. A little blue circle symbol appears at top right.

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Click this symbol and you can turn off filtering for this site only.

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Yes, great feature, once you are aware of it – but too subtle to be noticed by the average user browsing the web. From the user’s perspective, no amount of uninstalling and reinstalling of Flash Player would fix it, and the PC was about to be flung across the room in frustration.

The other problem is that the feature is too new and too little used to feature in most of the troubleshooting guides out there. It is not mentioned in Adobe’s page on troubleshooting Flash on Windows and in IE, for example.

How the setting got enabled in the first place is a mystery. Maybe a mis-click. It is unchecked by default, and you can see why.

Conclusions? I guess it shows that security without usability is ineffective; and that minimalist user interfaces can work against you if they in effect hide important information from the user.

Incidentally, this is why  I dislike the Windows 7 feature that hides notification icons by default. It is user-hostile and I advise disabling it by ticking Always shot all icons and notifications on the taskbar.

It may be more secure, but I would not consider enabling ActiveX Filtering for non-technical users.

development, microsoft, mono, professional, silverlight, software, software development

C# vs C++ and .NET vs Mono vs Compact Framework performance tests

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A detailed benchmark posted on codeproject investigates the performance of basic operations including string handling, hash tables, math generics, simple arithmetic, sorting, file scanning and (for C#) platform invoke of native code. These are the conclusions:

  • There is only a small performance penalty for C# on the desktop versus C++.
  • Mono is generally slower than Microsoft .NET but still acceptable, and all the benchmarks ran without modification.
  • The Compact Framework, an implementation of .NET for mobile devices, performs poorly.

My observations: this matches my own experiments. Why then do some .NET applications still perform badly? When Evernote switched its application from .NET to native code it got much better performance.

The main reason is a couple of issues that this kind of benchmark hides. One is the GUI layer, which involves a ton of platform invoke code under the covers. Another is the large size of .NET applications because of the runtime and library overhead; a lot more stuff gets loaded into memory.

One thing to like about Silverlight is that it is truly optimized for client programming and load time tends to be faster than for a desktop .NET application.

Note that for mobile these benchmarks suggest that C++ still has a big advantage. It would be interesting to see them applied to Silverlight apps on Windows Phone 7. As I understand it, the Silverlight .NET runtime in Windows Phone 7 shares code with the Compact Framework on Windows Mobile, so it is possible that the poor results for the Compact Framework would also apply to Silverlight on Windows Phone 7. Unfortunately developers do not have the option for C++ on Windows Phone 7.

microsoft, security

This is why people ignore security warnings: IE9 blocks official Microsoft update

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Microsoft has released a Web Standards Update for Visual Studio 2010, with new HTML5, CSS3 and JavaScript support.

I look forward to trying it; but Internet Explorer 9’s Smart Filter was not keen.

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What you cannot see from the screenshot is that the option to “Run anyway” is hidden by default. You have to click More Options; otherwise you just get the first two options, Don’t run, or Delete.

Note that this download is from an official Microsoft site, and has been downloaded, according to the stats on the page, nearly 6,500 times.

Developers can cope; but I think this sort of warning is extreme for a download from an official Microsoft site, whose main crime is being unknown, for some reason, to the SmartScreen database of approved executables.

Though maybe the Visual Studio team should have signed the installer.

The long term effect is that we learn to ignore the warnings. Which is a shame, because the next one might be real.

Update: How do other browsers handle this scenario? Here’s Google Chrome:

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Mozilla Firefox – a prompt, not a warning:

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same in Apple Safari:

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Which is best? Well, IE9 wins kudos for being the only browser to point out that the package is unsigned; but loses it for its over-the-top reaction. Chrome has pitched the leverl of warning about right; Firefox and Safari are perhaps too soft, though let’s also allow for the fact that their filters may already have worked out that thousands had already downloaded this file without known incident so far.

The IE9 issue is mainly because the installer package is unsigned, which is probably an oversight that will be fixed soon.

cloud computing, microsoft

Notes from the field: migrating a small business to Microsoft BPOS

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Today I assisted a (very) small company migrate from Small Business Server 2003 to BPOS (Business Productivity Online Suite), Microsoft’s hosted Exchange and SharePoint.

Why BPOS, when Office 365 launches later this month? Well, BPOS has all the features they need, and when given the choice between a beta-soon-to-be-just-launched online platform, and one that has been around for a few years, they chose the latter, which is reasonable. Long term it will make no difference, because BPOS users will be migrated to Office 365. It was interesting to me, since I am reviewing Office 365 and this migration gave me good insight into the differences.

Aside: the fact that this is a choice says something about Microsoft. One of the advantages of cloud computing is that improvements can be continuous and incremental, since the software is paid for by subscription rather than through a version upgrade cycle. There is only one Salesforce.com platform; there is only one Google Apps platform. Will there be an Office 720 in two to three years time, or will Microsoft have worked this out by then? It will be hard, because no doubt there are teams working on Exchange 2013 and SharePoint 2013 and these will be delivered as on-premise product upgrades. This also implies that the new features in these products will not be considered ready until the on-premise products go gold; which means that cloud customers have to wait a long time for major enhancements. Changing this cycle will require a profound shift in the way the company functions.

Now a few comments about the process. Overall it was pretty good, and took less time than it normally takes to migrate from one version of Small Business Server to the next. There are  annoyances though, beginning with the migration tools. The challenge is that you want to move mailboxes from SBS Exchange to online Exchange without losing any email.

Email coexistence

The basic approach is this:

1. A directory synchronisation tool copies user accounts to BPOS and keeps them in synch with on-premise Active Directory.

2. A mailbox migration tool copies mailboxes to BPOS and sets up forwarding, so email arriving into on-premise Exchange is forwarded to BPOS.

This is known as email co-existence, because users can log on to either on-premise Exchange or BPOS, and still be able to send and receive mail. Clever stuff, and it does make migration nice and smooth.

The first annoyance: the directory synchronization tool must be installed on a 32-bit Windows Server that is joined to the domain but not a domain controller. Many SBS setups do not have such a thing. In this case, I ran up Virtual PC on Windows 7 64-bit, installed 32-bit Server 2003, joined it to the domain (actually over a VPN), and ran the tool from there.

Actual mailbox migration uses a separate tool which fortunately does run on the SBS server itself. One the users are in place and enabled on BPOS, you run this tool to upload the mailboxes. This takes a while, since you are uploading what is probably several Gb of data. I left this running overnight, but it was only partially successful. Two mailboxes did not upload properly and had to be redone, which was a bit untidy because in one case some folders were duplicated. Fortunately it was not hard to clean up.

Once the mailboxes are migrated, you simply install and run Microsoft’s sign-in utility on each client PC. This automatically configures Outlook with a new BPOS profile, leaving the old profile in place in case of mishaps.

The last step is to change the DNS records so that mail is actually delivered to BPOS rather than to on-premise Exchange.

SharePoint migration

This particular company is reliant on SharePoint for document sharing. Although it is SBS 2003, they have SharePoint Services 3.0 installed; it can be done if you are careful.

Major annoyance: the BPOS documentation is silent on the subject of migrating content. There is a heading in the Migration Help for SharePoint Online; but it does not cover migration from on-premise to BPOS SharePoint at all. There are third-party tools that do this though, and some help from the community.

Of course there are multiple ways to move SharePoint content, though in some cases you will lose version information. I found this article helpful. I was able to start from Step 5, since it was already a SharePoint 3.0 site. Look how clear and concise the steps are; a refreshing contrast to Microsoft’s verbose efforts with seemingly endless sections for overviews, planning and deployment, that take ages to get to the point and still manage to omit key information.

I read the post and the comments, then created a blank site in BPOS. I backed up and then exported the existing site to CMP files, and kept it locked so that no new content would be added. Then I installed SharePoint Designer 2007, which is free, logged into the BPOS site and restored the site.

All the important things restored correctly. Unfortunately the permissions do not migrate, because the BPOS domain is different from the SBS domain; the active directory is only synchronized. I had to fix this up by deleting dud users and groups from the new site and adding groups and users for BPOS. I also added a few web parts to the otherwise blank home page. Nevertheless, considering how painful SharePoint migrations can be this one was pretty good.

I understand though that this simple approach does not always work. I would guess that the more SharePoint is customised, the more likely you are to have problems, which is probably why there is no official tool.

Exchange issues

There were a couple of issues with Exchange. The first was public folders, which are not supported in BPOS. The solution is to use SharePoint lists. Here is how it goes:

  1. Open an on-premise Outlook profile with full access to the public folders. Export each public folder to an Outlook .pst file – the best format for preserving all the data.
  2. Go to SharePoint online and create a new list of the appropriate type. For example, for tasks you need a task list, for contacts a contact list.
  3. Open Outlook with a BPOS profile. In SharePoint online, go to the target list and choose Connect to Outlook from the Actions menu.
  4. The SharePoint list now exists in Outlook. Open the .pst and copy the items exported from the public folder to the new list.
  5. Other users need only connect to the SharePoint list. The magic of synchronization copies the content.

Another issue is mailbox permissions. If you have users who want access to another user’s mailbox, you have to set permissions on the target mailbox to allow this. These permissions do not get migrated automatically. To do this, you have to use PowerShell. This article explains. The easiest route to a correctly configured PowerShell is to use the shortcut to the Migration Command Shell which is installed with the Microsoft Online migration tools.

A note on cost

BPOS costs $10 per user per month, with a minimum of 5 users. In the UK this is £6.72, so from £33.60 per month. Along with Exchange and SharePoint, you get Office Live Meeting (Web Conferencing) and Office Communications Online (Enterprise Live Messenger).

A typical SBS server lasts 3 to 5 years before it has to be replaced. Taking the shorter time for example, BPOS will cost £1209.60 in subscription costs over the lifetime of a physical server.

It seems obvious that if Exchange and SharePoint is all you need, and if you are happy with the implications of the cloud approach, BPOS works out cheaper. Of course the pricing will change, but Office 365 is actually coming out at a similar price for the equivalent features. Yes, you could buy a basic server with SBS for £1209, but that is just the start: installation, firewall, backup and maintenance all add to the cost.

That said, most businesses will still need some kind of on-premise server, even if it is no more than a simple NAS (Network Attached Storage) box. Another real-world problem is that there may be server-based applications which cannot easily be abandoned. If you find you have to run an on-premise server anyway, adding BPOS on top looks less attractive.

There is much more to say about cloud vs on-premise, but it is worth noting that it can be cost-effective.