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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

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 Microsoft’s cloud strategy from an executive’s view, and learn how partners are moving over 1,000 customers to the cloud. 1. Microsoft Exec Says Cloud Strategy Is Right On Track It’s old news that Microsoft is making a hard push towards the cloud. But Microsoft Office Division President, Kurt DelBene is taking a fresh look at Microsoft’s cloud strategy in our first BPOS Story from InformationWeek . DelBene offered an interview with InformationWeek in which he dives into some recent “significant customer wins” in the cloud and the progress of Office 2010, mobile and the future. DelBene points to greater productivity coming to mobile devices in the near future. “The first workload that will move to the cloud is messaging. We have been engaged with all cell phone manufacturers over the last several years to license our Exchange Active Sync (EAS) protocol.” The conversation from InformationWeek touches on some other cloud computing applications and the vision of the future. The article concludes with another Kurt DelBene quote, “‘Companies are looking to get the same capabilities in the cloud that they now have on premises, and they want to do that in a flexible way,’ he said. ‘There’s not a single one of our customers who says, ‘flip the switch, I’m moving everything today.’” What are your thoughts on Microsoft’s cloud strategy? Do you agree with Kurt DelBene? Leave your comments below. 2. Microsoft Partners Move 1,000 Customers to Cloud Computing Microsoft BPOS is enjoying some great success and adoption through the hard work of Partners that are committed to bringing new customers to Microsoft BPOS. In our second story for this week in BPOS news, we take a look at how some of the top Microsoft partners have brought more than 1,000 customers to cloud computing. With the Microsoft Worldwide Partner Conference coming up in July 2011, MSPmentor author Joe Panettieri believes that more partner wins are being recognized by Microsoft and third party websites. This article even points to a list of the top 10 U.S. BPOS partners based on company migrations. Joe Panettieri goes on to write about how he envisions Microsoft’s delicate cloud computing messaging in the near future. What do you think of partners moving 1,000 customers to the cloud? What messaging does Microsoft need to relay to Partners? Leave your thoughts in the comments section 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

It’s official, our next Microsoft Project Conference will be held a year from now in sunny Phoenix: Next Project Conference – March 19-22, 2012 . We will have plenty more content about the event in the future; until then as mentioned in the past you cannot miss this event for the quality of the content delivered by experts from our community worldwide and from the Microsoft Project group, not to mention the key networking opportunities you will gain at this event. Start planning by blocking off your calendar!

It’s official, our next Microsoft Project Conference will be held a year from now in sunny Phoenix: Next Project Conference – March 19-22, 2012 . We will have plenty more content about the event in the future; until then as mentioned in the past you cannot miss this event for the quality of the content delivered by experts from our community worldwide and from the Microsoft Project group, not to mention the key networking opportunities you will gain at this event. Start planning by blocking off your calendar!

You can now download a bunch of help content around Getting Started with Project 2010. This content includes a guide to the ribbon, information on what’s new in 2010, and a PowerPoint you can use for training people on 2010: Basic tasks in Project 2010.html Getting_Started_with_Project2010.wmv Project2010Guide.exe Reference_Project_2007_to_2010.xltx Training Presentation – Getting started with Project 2010.pptx What’s new in Project 2010.html Link to download location – https://www.microsoft.com/downloads/en/details.aspx?FamilyID=d05156e8-3ee5-4735-a45a-b4372f12abdb Additionally, you can find that help content and much more posted here – https://office2010.microsoft.com/en-us/project-help As always, let us know if you have any feedback on the content or have requests for future help articles.

Please find below a summary of the Microsoft Project and Project Server presence at the upcoming Microsoft Tech.Ed North America 2011 in Atlanta, May 16-19, 2011. We have a very exciting content and speakers line up (see summary below); not to mention a full Project booth with experts from Microsoft product group, support, consulting services and Project MVPs. Last but not least, yes we will have exciting giveaways as well, stay tune for more information, in the meantime register and attend (point your manager to this page: How to Convince Your Boss ). See you in Atlanta in May! Title Description Speaker OSP202 SharePoint Governance and Lifecycle Management with Microsoft Project Server 2010 Is SharePoint becoming an important part of your company’s overall IT offering? If so, it’s likely that you have a need to better manage SharePoint business requests – things like new sites, workflows, custom applications, web parts, and Business Intelligence dashboards. Join industry expert Scott Jamison as he discusses the importance of SharePoint lifecycle management from an IT governance perspective. We’ll introduce a free, downloadable solution that provides a powerful request and workflow process, enabling IT to view, analyze, prioritize and resource requests using the workflow and portfolio analytics capabilities of Project Server 2010. Business users are able to make special project requests through a form in Project Web App, and project managers can monitor and assign resources, evaluate priorities, and manage their overall project portfolio more efficiently. Scott Jamison, Christophe Fiessinger OSP203 Application Lifecycle Management: Microsoft Project Server 2010 and Microsoft Team Foundation Server 2010, Better Together The Microsoft Visual Studio Team Foundation Server 2010 and Project Server Integration Feature Pack further strengthens the Microsoft Application Lifecycle Management Solution by bridging the gap between Project Portfolio Management and Application Development. By bringing the best of these two worlds together, it creates a win-win situation that enables developers and project managers to use the tools and processes of their choice and collaborate at the granularity they desire. Bi-directional data synchronization between Team Foundation Server and Project Server allows the PMO and Development teams to share project information transparently and provide management with insight into resource utilization, portfolio execution and alignment with strategic objectives. This session provides an overview and demonstrates the Team Foundation Server and Project Server Integration feature pack. Ed Blankenship, Christophe Fiessinger OSP371-INT Best Practices Troubleshooting Microsoft Project Server 2010 Deployments Project Server 2010 is an integrated solution with Microsoft SharePoint Server 2010 Enterprise, and makes extensive use of Microsoft SQL Server – both through SharePoint and directly with its own databases. Troubleshooting requires knowledge of the full stack and the tools associated with gathering and analyzing data from each of the layers. This session highlights how these various tools are used in Microsoft Premier Support to troubleshoot issues and help resolve customers’ problems – and shows how you can use these tools. Brian Smith

While I was working on a demo VM, and similar to the Playbook tool ( Microsoft Project Server 2010 Server Settings Backup/Restore Tool ) I wrote this tool to easily export all the business drivers and impact statements from one PWA instance into a XML file and let you import them all (drivers & impact statements) into another PWA instance (few screenshots below). I have provided the source code so you can modify at will! You could also use this to backup a snapshot of drivers and impact statements at regular interval. I did not include prioritization but you could easily extend it yourself using the documented API in the SDK. This tool further illustrates how extensible the Project Server 2010 platform is. As usual please test this out on a test environment before using it production.

I posted a while back about Unknown Errors https://blogs.msdn.com/b/brismith/archive/2010/07/02/project-server-2010-an-unknown-error-has-occurred-in-project-center-resource-center-or-tasks.aspx in various places in project “&” here is another one.

For our latest BPOS Support series video we learn about the tools that administrators can use if issues arise when you or your users are sending and receiving email. Some of the steps in this video include how to check Microsoft Online Services for an outage, checking the MOS Service Health Dashboard, remote connectivity analyzer and checking inbound routing. The support video below should be in every administrators back pocket just in case an issue arises. 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.