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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 how the UN is taking a page from Microsoft’s datacenters to build more green, and we learn about how one company is utilizing the power of Microsoft Lync to help enterprises collaborate better. UN Taps Microsoft for Green Data Center Tech Datacenters are a crucial part of modern computing. Microsoft BPOS is powered by datacenters across the world and Microsoft has extensive knowledge in researching and developing datacenters. The UN is going to use Microsoft’s green data center technology to build its new office in Nairobi, Kenya. The Microsoft IT Pre-Assembled Components, or ITPAC, is a system constructed with the focus on providing the lowest Power Usage Effectiveness, or PUE, to decrease energy costs. Microsoft reports that the PUE for their ITPAC data centers is between 1.05-1.15. This a good range considering that the average PUE for data centers is reported to be 1.92, which is considered high by the Environmental Protection Agency. Check out the video below to learn how Microsoft’s ITPAC Containers are built. The UN Nairobi office wants to make its new office “energy-neutral” and is turning to Microsoft for help. What do you think of the “green” datacenter focus? Is it essential for companies to be green when it comes to datacenters? Leave your thoughts below. Telligent Connects With Microsoft Lync Telligent is known for their applications that foster community development. They are taking their community collaboration to the next level by utilizing Microsoft Lync . Microsoft Lync is the next generation unified communications in the Cloud. Telligent is syncing Lync with their social community software and enabling users the ability to harness the power of collaboration. Telligent Connect for Lync will be a part of the Telligent Enterprise and will feature the capabilities of Microsoft Lynch including worker’s online presence and launching instant messaging and meetings via Lync. Are you utilizing a Microsoft’s Cloud to create something? Share what you’ve made in the comments 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

The Office 365 Blog posted a new blog about the 2011 Microsoft Worldwide Partner Conference. In the blog post Allen Filush from the Office 365 blog explains the new awards being presented for Online Services Partners. This is an exciting way to be recognized for your hard work. Be sure to check out his entire blog copied below. – Josh Topal. —– Worldwide Partner Conference 2011 The 2011 Microsoft Worldwide Partner Conference is fast approaching, taking place July 10-14 at the Los Angeles Convention Center in Los Angeles, California. As a refresher, WPC is an annual gathering for the Microsoft partner community to learn about Microsoft’s roadmap for the upcoming year, network and build connections, share best practices, experience the latest product innovations and learn new skills and techniques. If you haven’t registered already, follow the link by April 25 th to get a special “early-bird” discount of 15%! New Awards for Online Services Partners Winning a WPC Partner Award is a great way to differentiate your company from your competition and get the recognition you deserve from the press, your industry, analysts and of course, Microsoft. Even better, winners will be invited onstage to be recognized for their achievements and receive exclusive access to an Awards celebration. Here you’ll have the opportunity to network with Microsoft Executives and showcase your ground-breaking solution. Nominations are underway and close April 15, so nominate your solution today! This year we are announcing two exciting new awards for Microsoft Online Services Partners: the Commercial Partner of the Year and the Solution Partner of the Year: Online Services Commercial Partner of the Year The Microsoft Online Services Commercial Partner of the Year Award honors Microsoft partners who have built a successful cloud practice and who have shown both innovation and results related to selling and to delivering solutions to the Small to Midmarket (SMB) customers. So don’t worry if you didn’t work with Coca-Cola or GlaxoSmithKline, we are very interested in partners that are having success in smaller and medium sized businesses. Read more about the award criteria (page 12) and submit your nomination by April 15 th . Online Services Solution Partner of the Year Developing solutions and selling to the “Big Guys?”

In our latest BPOS Support video , we explore the Microsoft Online Services Diagnostics and Logging Support Toolkit, or otherwise known as MOSDAL. MOSDAL performs network diagnostics and collects system information, network information and login information for service-based products. MOSDOL saves time by collecting numerous amounts of information with one tool. The video below shows you how to get MOSDAL, enable verbose logging, and troubleshoot common MOSDAL issues. Was this video helpful? Learn more about Microsoft Online Services with our other support and how to blog posts . What support videos would you like to see? We want to hear from you in the comments section below or send an email to our community mailbox . Follow us on Twitter and like our Facebook page.

Following the recent release of the Team Foundation Server 2010 and Project Server Integration Feature Pack ( Team Foundation Server 2010 and Project Server Integration Feature Pack has released! ) I’m very happy to announce the publication of another case study on the topic of Application Lifecycle Management (ALM) from TechResult in Brazil: https://www.microsoft.com/casestudies/Microsoft-Windows-Server-2003-R2-Enterprise-Edition-KN/TechResult/IT-Firm-Simplifies-Data-Exchange-to-Bridge-Gap-Between-Developers-and-Managers/4000009521 TechResult, an IT management and solution provider based in Brazil, wanted to bridge the gap between its developers and its project managers. Developers worked in Microsoft Visual Studio 2010 Ultimate with MSDN. Project managers gained insights and generated invoices and other reports using Microsoft Project Server 2010, but developers did not sufficiently update data in that software. TechResult deployed the Microsoft Visual Studio Team Foundation Server 2010 and Project Server Integration Feature Pack to simplify data exchange. Now, with a single source of truth, developers and project managers can collaborate more easily. Project managers cut time spent updating the status of projects by 70–80 percent and use their new visibility into projects to improve governance, manage risks, and make better decisions. TechResult also uses the feature pack to improve client visibility into projects. Key quotes With Visual Studio Team Foundation Server 2010 and Project Server Integration Feature Pack, we are saving 70–80 percent of the time that project managers used to spend talking about status updates. Project managers use the Visual Studio Team Foundation Server 2010 and Project Server Integration Feature Pack to gain more visibility into the development process. Key benefits Reduce Time Spent on Project Management Improve Governance Make More Informed Decisions Enrich Relationships with Customers More Microsoft ALM case studies can be found at: https://www.microsoft.com/casestudies/Case_Study_Search_Results.aspx?Type=1&Keywords=ALM Obrigado TechResult and Daniel!

Extremely excited to announce the release of Microsoft Project Inside 2011 , a series of every day products with a guaranteed quality label. The first wave of Microsoft Project Inside 2011 products includes cutting edge tablet running your favorite your favorite work collaboration tool. These two and a lot more are available at your favorite retailer, just make you look for the Microsoft Project 2011 Inside sticker clearly displayed on the front. But wait there is more, check out the Microsoft Project Inside 2011 usb keys and more importantly the highly desired Microsoft Project Inside 2011 carpet which comes with other patterns of your favorite productivity tools: Last but not least make sure you purchase Microsoft Project 2010 Kinect Edition: You Are the Controller! again containing the much acclaimed Microsoft Project Inside 2011 label: Happy Microsoft Project Inside 2011 purchases!

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 what Microsoft has to offer in the cloud and we look some interesting findings around small-to-medium business cloud adoption. What does Microsoft have to offer in the cloud? Our first story for This Week in BPOS News explores the many ways Microsoft brings the cloud to you. Simon May dedicates a TechNet blog post to describing several Microsoft Cloud offerings. He starts at the lowest level by explaining what the Cloud is. I think he does a great job outlining the basics of Cloud Computing and diving into the following Microsoft Cloud offerings: Windows Azure SQL Azure Office 365 and BPOS Windows Intune Hyper-V Cloud Simon introduces the above Microsoft Cloud offerings and explains them in a way that is easily digestible. I would recommend this blog post for anyone interested or intimidated in the Cloud, and wanting to learn more about the many Cloud products Microsoft is working on. Are you in the Cloud? What Microsoft Cloud offerings are you familiar with? Leave your comments below.

I’ve just updated the running blog post that give the version numbers to identify the specific release of Project Server 2010 and SharePoint Server 2010 you have loaded – https://blogs.msdn.com/b/brismith/archive/2010/09/23/how-to-tell-which-cumulative-update-hotfix-or-service-pack-version-of-project-server-2010-and-project-2010-you-are-running.aspx This now includes the February 2011 Cumulative Update for Project Server – including the link to the published KB on the roll-up – which can be found at https://support.microsoft.com/kb/2475879 . One quick reminder – there are other packages which can be loaded for just SharePoint Server or Project Server – which may mean that the versions of the databases could be different to the ones I have listed.

If you think about it, meetings are a lot like projects. They’re for a defined amount of time with the goal of getting something accomplished. All good meetings have a defined agenda just like all good projects have a detailed schedule. Since you can use Project to create schedules, why not use Project to create your agendas? Now this is probably overkill for your one hour meeting where the agenda is three bullet points but if you are trying to plan a multi-hour meeting where a variety of speakers have to present and you need to stick to a timeframe – Project can definitely help. I recently had to plan a meeting that had some complexity and using Project saved me time. I knew that we had four hours available and had to get in seven presentations plus an intro and conclusion. I started by just dividing the time out and giving everyone the same amount of time but then all the speakers were saying they needed extra time or didn’t need that much time. If I had been in Excel or Word I would have had to manually update all the time slots and then constantly be checking to make sure everything still fit. Since I was in Project, I could make use of links and deadlines to automate this. This was especially handy after I made what I thought was the final schedule and someone pointed out I should probably add some breaks seeing how it was a four hour meeting – whoops. The below timeline is the final result of my planning and made for a great agenda graphic in my meeting request: How did I do this: Create a new project. Go to the Project tab – Project Information and set the project start date to the exact date and time of the meeting. Ex. 3/23/11 1:00 PM. If your meeting goes over lunch or outside normal working hours, also make sure to set the Project Calendar to the 24 hour calendar so it doesn’t affect your agenda. Go to File tab – Options. On the General tab, set the date format to HH:MM On the Duration tab, set Duration is entered in Minutes (or Hours is that works better for you) Now add your agenda items in the order you’ll be presenting. Feel free to use summary tasks to help organize the topics – I did. Select the last meeting item and go to the Task Information dialog – Advanced tab. Set the deadline to be the meeting end time. This way you’ll get an indication if you go over time. Now link all of the tasks by selecting them and clicking Link Tasks on the Task tab. You can now start playing with different durations to build a meeting agenda that will work. Don’t forget breaks! When you are done, you can create an agenda timeline by right-clicking the tasks and selecting Add to Timeline. Here’s the actual schedule that I created: Happy meeting planning!

Fast forward four years. It’s 2009. Remember that you’re Sara, the CIO of a mid-to-large retail company. You have many accomplishments that the business leadership team (and Board of Directors) has recognized: a streamlined supply-chain management system that reduces costs and out-of-stock conditions in stores, expanded your ecommerce presence to Europe, and improved the service levels of your major mission critical applications substantially as well as most of your “tier 2” applications, to name a few. Internally, you recognized that to have accomplished these goals for the business, changes within your IT group had to be made: You examined the IT processes that historically were either poorly performing or not defined and created programs and training for staff to implement IT management processes based on ITIL You virtualized most of your data center except for your mission critical applications and large database systems You implemented an IT service management management function that resulted in a robust but practical and usable configuration management database (CMDB) You created an SLA enforcement mechanism for your critical applications that has the effect of notifying your systems operations center when mission critical application components fail As a result, sales are up, costs are noticeably lower, and service quality is significantly improved. Life is sunny. Until the clouds come (sorry, I just had to put that in!) The implementation of your online presence in Europe has increased the traffic to your site infrastructure by 20%. Moreover, this move results in many holiday specialty items. While your ecommerce infrastructure (web site, fulfillment, inventory, and supply chain) has generally kept up with demand, it has struggled with performance and scaling issues during the holiday season. Also, the annual operational cost of the data center is quite high due to the need to support seasonal demands. This new expansion is stressing your servers even more at peak and, though you’ve grown capacity to meet the demand, your CFO is putting pressure on you to cut operational costs. As you look at your utilization reports in February and March, noting the significantly low traffic that your servers are getting, you know a change needs to be made. To solve the performance issues and the overall seasonality challenge that’s causing significant annual operating costs, you form a task force to investigate the implementation of a private cloud environment. While you believe this will potentially solve the performance and scale issues, you’ve come up with more questions than answers. On the plus side, cloud technologies promise significant scalability benefits (elasticity) to be able to more effectively handle the seasonality concerns, including scaling back services when demand is low. This plan could also result in improvements in your ability to deliver services on demand by deploying ready-made virtual machines for web and application servers. However, many questions persist: What model do I choose: PaaS, IaaS, or some combination? If I choose infrastructure as a service, how do I guarantee the quality of the resulting applications? If I go with platform as a service, what standard services do I put in place that will promote agility without sacrificing quality? How do I enable flexibility and not compromise compliance? Will it be cost-effective? I have a charge-back model today for the services I provide to various lines of business. How will I need to redefine that model so I can keep costs in line? How will it affect my service delivery? Right now now I have a pretty well-defined service management system that helps me keep my critical apps up. Will there be significant VM sprawl as a result of the elasticity I should be getting? If so, how will that affect my ability to manage this sprawl for my critical applications. Heck, I just finished getting a handle on my tier 2 apps. Will I lose control of those? If you haven’t gathered by now, there are themes here that the War on Cost team has been exploring and discussing for some time across a variety of scenarios. They are the enduring business value pillars of reducing costs, improving agility, improving quality of service, improving governance and compliance, and managing risk. All of these value dimensions are in play with the introduction of a cloud paradigm. In fact, they have the potential to be amplified: Agility – Possibly the value pillar with the highest potential amplitude. The cloud paradigm (whether public, private, or something in between) has the potential for extreme agility. Automatically provisioning development, test, and production environments in a matter of minutes or hours instead of days or weeks has enormous potential Costs – Costs have the potential to be dramatically reduced by providing a commoditized set of services that can be automatically commissioned and decommissioned at will. Also, server utilization can be significantly improved through intelligent load balancing as demands for the service change, particularly due to seasonal demands from stores and online traffic Quality of Service – QoS in all its forms (reliability, scalability, performance, availability, etc.) can be greatly improved by intelligently and dynamically load balancing workloads across (potentially large) arrays of servers running as VMs on a farm of servers that are well-utilized Governance, Compliance, and Risk Management (GRC) – These three are related values and the cloud offers huge potential benefits here too. As services are defined (whether its infrastructure, platform, or software), they are standardized (one of the main tenets of cloud computing). Standardization has the natural implication of introducing governance and compliance regulations, which, in turn, has a direct net benefit to managing risk But, and it’s a really big but, what about complexity? You’re thinking about the sheer number of VMs that can get spun up in your data center. Where once you had a hundred or so servers, you now have somewhere between five hundred and a thousand VMs (you’re not really sure). Will implementing cloud exacerbate that VM growth? How can I contain it? How much should I contain it? So, therein lies the challenge before you: if you’re going to move to a private cloud because you and your business leadership team see the potential for huge benefits, how will you manage the complexity introduced by this cloud to be able to maintain and enhance your IT team’s ability to deliver for the business? What do you think? Do these ideas ring true with you? Are there other major considerations to weigh? Let us know what your experience has been. Have you answered these questions for your organization? Don’t be shy. We want to hear from you. All the best, Erik, Strategist, War on Cost

Customers and partners are utilizing Microsoft BPOS to create new and innovative cloud products. The blog post below comes from CionSystems, Inc. and describes what they are doing in the cloud with the power of Microsoft BPOS. Do you have a BPOS story? Send the BPOS Community team an email. -Josh Single Sign-On, Password Self-Service, and Deprovisioning Solutions Identity Management is a hidden, but significant, cost for most businesses. Whether companies use business intelligence and reporting to track the cost of identity management in their IT infrastructure or not, industry experts like Gartner, ARC, Forrester, IDC, and many of their competitors know that Identity Management is a multi-billion dollar industry. When companies fail to manage identity or manage it poorly, those companies lose significant profit from their revenue stream. From forgotten passwords to unlocking accounts, help-desk support calls, provisioning access to IT systems, maintaining accounts and access to multiple systems, and removing unnecessary access when employees leave the company or no longer need that access, companies spend hundreds of thousands of dollars annually, if not millions, to manage their identity infrastructure. Just for handling the problem of lost productivity when employees need passwords to be reset to gain access to their workstations, a 1,000 person company can easily spend in excess of US $300K per year. That cost increases in direct proportion to the number of employees and that cost may further and exponentially increase in direct proportion to the number of systems to be managed by the IT infrastructure. Furthermore, increasing oversight by newly evolving government acts and regulations require stricter auditing and reporting (e.g., HIPAA, SOX, GLBA, CFR, etc.) for companies in the healthcare, financial, and telecommunications sectors. It is now more important than ever to know exactly which employees have access to which systems and data and when they do not. In addition to limiting the amount of damage that disgruntled employees can do after leaving a company, user accounts that await deprovisioning after an employee has been terminated still remain a security vulnerability for hackers breaking into corporate networks. The Cloud now provides exciting new ways for companies to lower costs by employing new purchase-only-what-you-need and pay-for-only-what-you-use models, but also introduces new security challenges for identity management potentially increasing support calls to the help desk for password and account management. For pennies on the dollar, small to large enterprises need a way to mitigate the lost productivity of employees requiring a password reset or needing to unlock their accounts in the local domain or in the Cloud. Additionally companies require transparent, bi-directional synchronization of identities with the Cloud and deprovisioning of user accounts needs to be immediate both in the local domain as well as the Cloud. CionSystems provides a cohesive solution to the above challenges via comprehensive, transparent, bi-directional, real-time directory synchronization between the local domain and the Cloud. Single Sign-On (SSO) and migration to the Cloud is supported by CionSystems’ Cloud Management Tool. CionSystems, Inc. https://www.cionsystems.com