This caught our attention today on the BBC website, http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/technology/8148969.stm as Microsoft are looking to grow significantly their “cloud” offerings, already there is Exchange Hosted Services, Business Productivity Online Suite (BPOS, online versions of Exchange, Sharepoint, OCS and Live Meeting) and now with the addition of online versions of the office suite, this is going to provide an impressive set of choices for office infrastructure deployments.

The real plus about Microsoft’s offerings which differentiate it from some of the others we have looked at, is with their heritage of “on premise” solutions, Microsoft offer an excellent mix of either On premise, Cloud or importantly a “co-existence” offering providing both on premise and cloud working together seamlessly. we are currently working with a big client of ours on a project that does just that for over 1000 mailboxes.

interesting times.

if you want to see more on office 2010, check out the Microsoft site http://www.microsoft.com/office/2010/