Organizations today have many choices regarding their collaboration and information management environments. As budget pressures continue to drive evaluations of new and existing technologies, hosted services offer the ability to reduce on-premises infrastructure and administrative costs. Collaboration technology is quickly becoming a critical communication and productivity tool in today’s businesses. A consistent set of features allows users to complete tasks quickly and collaborate with coworkers more effectively.

SharePoint Online provides the robust capabilities of Microsoft SharePoint Server and is hosted by Microsoft as a cloud-based service. With SharePoint Online, your IT team can provide a single, integrated location where employees can: efficiently collaborate with team members, find organizational resources, search for information, and manage content and workflow, without the operational burden that comes from managing the infrastructure associated with on-premises software. SharePoint combines a rich collaborative experience, but it also supports rich application development and integration.

The global economic environment will drive demand for less expensive cloud based collaboration services that benefit from the economies of scale. Organizations will be reticent to compromise cost reduction for a lack of control of their data, or limit control of their policies and procedures. That’s why a mixed approach to the cloud, with the choices afforded by software plus services, is a much more flexible and realistic scenario for most organizations. While we are advocates for the delivery of cloud based services, there is a desire among many customers to avoid a technology ultimatum. We believe it’s critical to focus on what customers want, and their readiness to embrace the cloud for various applications in the context of their circumstances, instead of forcing a decision to move everything to the cloud. Information management and security remains the single biggest IT issue for organizations. Taking advantage of the benefits offered by SharePoint Online in conjunction with other cloud based services delivered through BPOS and your existing on premises technology investments can help to simultaneously reduce the costs of managing your collaboration infrastructure without sacrificing control.