Please keep in mind, I'm writing this as a BPOS (business productivity online suite) user and it's based on my current information. Please correct me if I'm wrong about any of the information below so I can update the post.
I'm a big fan of the idea behind BPOS and when the platform works well it's definitely worth it. However, I wanted to let people know these few cavaets in regards to switching to the service from an inhouse solution. There are a few things I realized I missed a lot only after migrating our company infrastructure.
Exchange:
- There is no way for you to look up internal logs of emails sent between users. So if user ben@yourdomain.com emails jeff@yourdomain.com and comes to you saying they sent an email but the Jeff never received it, outside of looking in their sent mail and the other users inbox, you really can't do anything accept call BPOS and ask them to dig into it.
- You have no way of monitoring email behavior. You can't tell if one person is emailing a lot, or even spamming, nor can you setup warnings if there is any specific activity. So if you have a user that's spamming, you have to hope that internal Microsoft alerts catch him/her before they ruin your email reputation (for the domain, not sure about IP reputation).
- Want to find out who has been emailing a certain user? Again, without just going into their exchange inbox/sent items, you can't do a search. There is an audit tool available online in the ForeFront admin portal, but it requires that you know the domain of both the sender and recipient, so you can't just do a query and see all the emails that someone received (or sent).
- It's slow. Emails are frequently delayed and waiting as long as a minute for an email someone sent you is not uncommon. This applies not only to external emails coming into BPOS, but internal company emails as well. So if you are on the phone with someone and they say "check your email, I just sent you something", give it a little bit of time.
Livemeeting:
- You do not get a call in option for your livemeetings. Unless you combine your Livemeeting service with a third party conference call service, the only way people can get into the meeting and get audio is through their computer speakers/headset. Not sure about other companies, but our C level and upper management users are very unhappy about this. Also, the third party solution isn't fully integrated, even if you go with it, someone still has to be a manager and create conference bridges that can be sent out. Basically, if your employees want to create conferences on whim that allow people to call in, it's not possible. They will still need to get a phone number or a time from whomever is in charge of the telephone conference setup.
Communicator:
- Audio calls rarely work between users not on the same network. I'm assuming this is due to a SIP call being setup between the two clients directly (unlike chat, which goes through the Microsoft BPOS Office Communicator Server). Due to firewall issues, there are frequently issues when attempting to setup a SIP connection between two clients on different networks. Unless all your offices are linked via VPNs, or everyone is in the same office, be prepared for issues. Last ticket we create with Microsoft for this, they came back and told is it is simply unsupported. Technically, we were told all the clients need to be on the same domain, but I really doubt it has anything to do with the domain, and relates more to "the same network", which is usually what you have when everyone is on the same domain.
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