T-suite.com customers get Lync Online, SharePoint Online and Exchange Online with a reduced features set, Innis says. The missing features, mainly in SharePoint Online, are enterprise focused
and relate to collaboration across multiple organisations with thousands of employees and access to SharePoint Online by role type. “They are features that an SMB will never need” and the products are priced accordingly, Innis says.
Microsoft is also backs its sarvice contracts with financial penalties, unlike Google Apps. It guarantees 99.9 percent uptime for BPOS and Office 365. “Any time a customer experienced
an outage, they receive 100 percent of their monthly fee back from Microsoft,” Innis says.
“Google doesn’t offer those same terms. Google doesn’t count outages that are less than 10 minutes each. And the support is very different to what Microsoft offers; 24x7 support for Online Services through T-Suite and through Microsoft for enterprise agreement customers.”
Microsoft’s early foray into online services was timid, with few features compared to the on- premise versions. Innis says this will change with Office 365.
“The vast majority of features available in on-premise will be available in Office 365. If you were a really huge enterprise customer there may well be some differences in feature set. Like in SharePoint, for example.”
Deskless Worker, a cut-down version for employees who don’t have desks, is renamed Kiosk Worker. BPOS customers using these licences include hospitality and airlines which provide them for flight attendants, runway workers and so on. SharePoint Online and Exchange Online will not differ too much from current services. Lync will be a major upgrade to the Office Communications Server in BPOS that it supersedes.
Lync Online
Lync, the sequel to Office Communications Server, was launched in November. Although Microsoft only released the on- premise application, the vendor says Lync Online will not bring any new features when it launches as part of Microsoft 365 later this year.
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