About Microsoft Business Productivity Online Suite ( BOPS )

Basically it is a pre configured hosting environments that offers SharePoint online , Exchange servers and unified communications functionalities and it have to types a type where you can get your own servers for you company ( more expensive ) and the other  type will be of course sharing the servers with other clients

and of course they provide a user friendly interface to administrate all the functionalities , you can even subscribe for a free 1 month trial using your live ID

you read for more info here

BOPS Main site

and a very nice demo show how it works and how you can manage the service

some of BOPS main challenges are discussed here

which are basically

• No control over the search or indexing schedules.
• No mail enabled lists.
• No customized work flows (aka Visual Studio work flows)
• No browser based forms.
• Since it’s shared hosting there is of course no deployment of custom dll’s,  assemblies, wsp’s, custom features or any files in the 12-hive (is this also valid if you have a “dedicated solution”? I believe they are have 2 different scenarios in the “cloud”)

Backup retention of only 2 weeks

Before I aggressively defend against the BPOS position let me just point out, that I actually think the BPOS is a really interesting almost sweet MS deal for the right kind of scenario (ie. a rather simple one).

My main cons on the BPOS case:

· If customization is supported/allowed at all…? MS has taken serious exclusions in the SLA´s. So basically You´ll probably be in a very tight spot when accident happens or performance deteriorates.  Agree!

· SharePoint Online is offering MOSS Standard edition, so it doesn’t´t support Excel Services, InfoPath Forms Services, My Sites or Enterprise Data Search. This means no indexing of internal data stores or SharePoint sites. Why internal SharePoint sites…? See next line.

· What about extranet scenarios and Internet scenarios – as far as I can find You´ll still need on-the-premises installations…?

· Functionality is somewhat limited all around (ex. SharePoint Online is offering only the 3p workflow, which might be enough and then again might not…). Note: We need to dig into this in much more detail to get the real picture of what is and what isn’t´t included…

· What about integrations to existing LOB data, applications etc. (as I see it, this is only possible if there is an existing MS package, web part etc that enables the integration .. else we have nothing J)

· What about migrations? Yes, You can probably quite easily transfer your mail-accounts (as a minimum make your existing Exchange forward to the new Exchange online) but what about documents, public folders etc.?

other good resources can be found here