Adventures in Cloud Computing, Part 2

A BPOS Story with a Happy Ending

One of the first articles I posted on the re-launched Dynamics CRM Trick Bag was a bit of a rant about the Microsoft product Business Productivity Online Suite (BPOS, for short). This is Microsoft’s “cloud computing” suite of hosted Exchange, SharePoint and Live Meeting. I had a heck of a time getting it configured, and in the previous article I compared BPOS somewhat less than favorably with their other high-profile cloud offering, Dynamics CRM Online.

The day after I posted that article, my phone rang off the hook. I probably received ten calls from three different members of the Microsoft Online Services team. One of them ended up playing the quarterback role for me, and set up a call with the appropriate people from their side, with as it turned out two main goals:

1. Solve my problems and get my company up and running
2. Get my feedback about what they could be doing better to improve their service

I must say, I was quite impressed. I didn’t post the article thinking it would get a reaction like that, and I’m still not sure what kind of alerts they must have configured on Twitter to have reacted so quickly. But in any event, after a couple of calls and some changing of MX records and some making of the hosted email server “authoritative” for incoming email, we were up and running. We’ve been up now for a couple of months, it works great, I don’t get any untrapped spam anymore, and we’re a happy camper.
As far as the constructive feedback I offered them, I think it boiled down to:

• The distinction between the user site and the administrator site was confusing and should be cleaned up.
• They need better step-by-step instructions overall, and in particular for doing things like changing MX records & making the MS-hosted server authoritative for inbound email.

Based on my experience, I’d say that BPOS will be successful. The team is certainly listening to its customers and trying to fix their problems. I was amazed at how fast they responded to my venting, as well as with how carefully they listened to my input. They still have a little work to do in making it easier to get up and running, which I’ll try to summarize next.

BPOS and Dynamics CRM Online: User Experience Compared

I used the hosted version of Dynamics CRM (“CRM Online”) for about a year. (I used the free partner demo version, and kept our production CRM on the on-premise version – Dynamics CRM 4.0 Enterprise, to be exact.) As I mentioned in my previous article, the CRM Online user experience is better than BPOS, and the BPOS team would do well to take a page or two out of the CRM Online book. With CRM Online, you whip out your proverbial credit card, pay for however many seats you want, and you’re up and running immediately. In my opinion, any user who can use a web browser will be able to get CRM Online up and running; again, this is still not the case with BPOS, which I believe most organizations will not be able to get up and running without the assistance of a consulting shop or BPOS technical support. Not exactly the Gartner Magic Quadrant, but here’s one way to look at it:

One of the sweet spots for any hosted SaaS offering has got to be the small-medium business market. I suspect I’m not the only business proprietor who’s downsized in the past few years and simply can’t justify staff and infrastructure to maintain a bunch of servers in my shop. For me, there’s absolutely no strategic value in hosting my own Exchange Server, and very little in hosting my CRM server.

A big part of the costs of being on-premise are the costs of installing, configuring…getting up and running. In my opinion, the current version of Dynamics CRM Online effectively removes those costs, which will help push organizations to the online product.

The BPOS team has a great product and like I said above they seem very committed to improving the customer experience. But to really drive adoption, they need to change the “will require assistance” in the Up and Running column to “anybody can do this”; they have a high bar to shoot for, set by Dynamics CRM Online.