This Week in BPOS News 2/18

This week in BPOS news is a recurring segment on the Microsoft Online Services Team Blog that covers news from all sectors of Cloud Computing and the Microsoft Online Services business suite known as the Business Productivity Online Suite (BPOS). You can read all past This Week in BPOS News segments here. For this week in BPOS news we take a look at the Cloud competition of Google and Microsoft, and we examine Exchange Coexistence. 1. Google Apps Won't Beat Microsoft, Says Customer Who's Tried Both The Why Microsoft Blog features customer stories and experiences that outline why a user should choose Microsoft over the competition. Their latest blog post features a valentine theme that may not be so lovely for Google fans. Tom Rizzo writes on the Why Microsoft blog about why Google Apps may cause you “heartache…after encountering a wide range of problems.” The San Francisco Chronicle picked up on the Why Microsoft blog post and calls the letters “corny, but the sentiment is real.” The San Francisco Chronicle writer, Matt Rosoff, examines in his own opinion how “Google Apps won’t beat Microsoft” through the real experience of an IT recruiting firm, BridgeView IT. Matt lists the following reasons as why BridgeView chose to go with BPOS instead of the competition: “Google Apps had trouble syncing data with employees' BlackBerry devices. BridgeView makes heavy use of nested email folders in Outlook, which didn't show up correctly in Gmail . When BridgeView tried to contact Google for support, they couldn't find a phone number to call. Google does offer a support line for issues like major outages, but for point questions Google pointed BridgeView to online forums.” Do you think that Google Apps won’t beat Microsoft? What is your opinion on Microsoft and the competition in the cloud? Leave your comments below. 2. Keep Exchange In-House and in the Cloud with Coexistence Do you know what “Exchange Coexistence” is? Jabez Gan, writer for Enterprise Networking Planet , describes it as “the option to run Exchange Servers in-house, but host mailboxes at Microsoft's data center.” Jabez Gan writes about the pros and cons of choosing Exchange Coexistence in our second featured article . The article first touches on the advantages of Exchange Coexistence which dissect both on and off-premises Exchange servers. Jabez also details the differences between On-premise Exchange and Off-premises Exchange. The disadvantages of Exchange Coexistence are listed as well as a section entitled “When does coexistence work?” This final section may be the most useful because it outlines three distinct scenarios that would or would not call for Exchange Coexistence. Jabez concludes that the decision will revolve around the all mighty dollar. He recommends that you follow the scenarios in his post to help weigh the costs and benefits of having Exchange Coexistence. I would recommend this article to anyone interested in Exchange Coexistence and suggest that you reply to the Enterprise Networking Planet blog post with your own scenario. What do you think about Exchange Coexistence? Are you moving to Exchange Coexistence? Leave your comments and scenarios below. What are your thoughts about the stories we shared with you this week? Did you see a story you want to share with us? Let us know what other topics you’d like to see. You can comment on this blog post or send an email to our community mailbox . Follow us on Twitter and like our Facebook page.

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This Week in BPOS News 2/18