Business Productivity Online Standard Suite
Microsoft Business Productivity Online Standard Suite is a set of messaging and collaboration solutions hosted by Microsoft, and consists of Exchange Online, SharePoint Online, Office Live Meeting, and Office Communications Online. These online services are designed to give your business streamlined communication with high availability, comprehensive security, and simplified IT management. Your business benefits from always up-to-date technologies that are deployed rapidly, maximizing your valuable IT resources and reducing your need for infrastructure investments.
Overview of SharePoint Online 2007
SharePoint Online Admin Center
Microsoft supports the following languages for SharePoint online: English, French, German, Japanese and Spanish. And the offering was just recently made available to a number of countries other than the United States.
Here is a quick view of what you get with SharePoint Online Standard:
SharePoint Online Standard — Key Features
SharePoint Deskless Worker
In addition to the standard user, Microsoft offers a special deskless worker subscription. This is typically a person who needs access to information on the Intranet site but does require the collaboration capabilities. Generally they may not work in the office or have an assigned PC. Deskless workers cannot upload or create documents, only view and download.
Secure and Fully Backed Up
Access to your SharePoint Online Site is encrypted with 128 bit SSL encryption. Availability is 99.9% and backups are performed every 12 hours. There is also the Recycle Bin for most content types, the exception being deleted web pages (not web part pages) and customizations done using SharePoint Designer.
You also have virus filtering of email and other content using Microsoft Forefront Security for SharePoint. There are also a number of files types that are blocked from upload to SharePoint Online including: asp, bat, exe, class and more.
Okay enough of the basics. Time to get to the heart of the situation and look at what you do and do not get with the standard version of SharePoint Online.
Getting Started
You don't create your Site Collections though the usual SharePoint Server Administration. You do through the Online Admin Center. This means you can't create a site collection from a custom template — you only have the default options available.
Remember the forty application templates that SharePoint offers free? You can upload any one of those to get a custom site created.
SharePoint Online — Create Site Collection
Once you have your first collection created you can start using SharePoint Online. You will need to add any users you want to access the site — this is also done through the Online Admin Website.
Microsoft also provides one-way Directory synchronization to help you get your users imported to SharePoint Online quickly.
SharePoint Online — Admin, Manage Users
Single Sign On Application
To make life a little easier when using SharePoint Online, you download and install the Microsoft Online Services Sign-In application. This application enables you to move through the site without having to continually provide your credentials.
SharePoint Online Standard Capabilities
SharePoint Online is offered as a collaboration and communications tool for organization's Intranets. It offers the following types of functionality.
• Collaboration
• Portals
• Search
• Content Management
• Business Process and Forms
In the standard version, you do not get all the functionality that you would if you implemented your own version of SharePoint on premise or if you subscribed to the Dedicated Version. Here's a look at what you get and don't get.
Collaboration What you get:
• Six default site templates (wiki, blog, team site, document workspace, blank, basic meeting)
• Surveys
• People and Groups
• Calendars
• Issue Tracking
• Document Collaboration
• Site Admin templates
What you don't get:
• Presence awareness
• social networking
• Templates (all meeting templates except basic)
• Site Templates (My Site, News Site, Internet Presence Site)
• Templates requiring server side code
• Server Admin Templates
Portals What you get:
• Client Integration
• SharePoint Designer Integration
• Audience Targeting to a SharePoint group
• Portal Site templates
• Site Manager
• Site and Document Aggregation
• Document Rollup Web Part
• Mobile Device Support
What you don't get:
• My Sites
• Audience targeting to distribution groups or the ability to create audiences
• Membership web parts
• User Profiles Import
• Back and Restore via SP Designer
Content Management What you get:
• Document Information and Panel Bar
• Site Authoring
• Master Pages, Page Layouts, navigation controls
• Some retention and auditing policies
• Three State Workflow and all standard document workflows
• WYSIWYG Editor
• Standard Publishing Site Templates: Collaboration and Publishing
• Site Variations
What you don't get:
• Content Staging, Publishing and Deployment
• Standard enterprise site templates
• Records repository and legal holds
• Email content as records
Search What you get:
• Search within site collection
• Security trimmed results
• Configurable scope
What you don't get:
• Cross collection search
• Enterprise content sources
• People Search
• Search Federation
• Business Data Search
Business Process and Forms What you get:
• Form Libraries
• Custom no-code workflows
What you don't get:
• Custom workflows that are coded
• Browser-based forms
• SharePoint Server OOTB workflows
Customization Capabilities
Probably one of the most important questions you may have about using SharePoint Online is what can you customize. You can do customizations, but you are limited to customizing only what doesn't require coding.
SharePoint Designer is the tool to use to customize your SharePoint Online site. With it you can:
• Create no-code workflows
• Modify and create master pages, page layouts
• Create content types and taxonomy
• Create custom site templates
• Use the Data Form Web Part to create mashups of SharePoint data or other data brought in using Web Services
• Create InfoPath Forms — no code allowed
If you are using Visual Studio to build custom web parts, features or workflows, then you don't want SharePoint Online:
• No in-line code is allowed, including code in InfoPath Forms or custom coded workflows
• Can't create features, site definitions, web parts, solutions — anything that requires something be installed and configured on the server.
• You also can't modify SharePoint files, web.config settings or security
• No custom database modifications
• No configuration changes that affect the web server or the .NET framework
SharePoint Online 2010 Overview
Microsoft is working hard to get SharePoint 2010 ready for the market. Currently Microsoft runs SharePoint 2007 with Microsoft Online Services/BPOS.
Reference
http://www.microsoft.com/online/business-productivity.mspx
http://www.microsoft.com/downloads/details.aspx?FamilyID=D007F35E-375C-4B11-BC40-BC9082BB224A&displaylang=en
http://www.bposrocks.com/
http://www.cmswire.com/cms/enterprise-cms/sharepoint-online-saas-review-what-it-is-and-isnt-004351.php
