Put your two cents in

May 10, 2010 13:48 GMT  ·  By

Microsoft has shared a list containing no less than a dozen features that, according to the company, are top requests from customers running BPOS (Business Productivity Online Standard Suite). Data centralized from the support desk, advisory board and early adopter feedback has been used in order to highlight the 12 most requested features for BPOS, which customers will be able to find at the bottom of this article. The Redmond company is essentially asking for additional input from customers, testers, partners, etc., in order to prioritize items on this list for their addition to BPOS.

“As with any discussion about capabilities and development, we always face some pretty aggressive trade-offs and prioritization. Said another way, we cannot guarantee that your favorite will be next in line, but we can guarantee that we will use your feedback to help us make those trade-offs. So, fire away! Please give us your feedback by commenting here (the Microsoft Online services team blog) or emailing our community mailbox at bposcom at microsoft.com,” Microsoft’s Josh Topal revealed.

According to Topal, early adopters that have already tested Exchange 2010 and SharePoint Server 2010 will notice that some of the features enumerated by Microsoft are already on their way. BPOS will be upgraded later this year, in an effort to align the Cloud-based suite with the latest iterations of Exchange and SharePoint.

“We take customer feedback seriously and work to incorporate it into our service updates with new capabilities every 90 days. We’ve compiled a sampling of the top requested features from you, our customers, and we’d like to share that list for commentary and feedback from you on this blog. Which features rank highest or lowest in your opinion? Which are not on the list that should be? We’ll take your feedback as well as that of our early adopters, advisory boards, customer meetings, and support desk to help us shape the evolution of the service in the future,” Topal added.

Here is the list of features provided by Microsoft:

1. Single SignOn: The ability to sign in to Online Services and your own network with the same credentials

2. Sharing Free/Busy information in Outlook between on-premises and online users

3. The ability to federate Office Communications Online instant messaging with Office Communications Server, business partners and via Public IM Connectivity (PIC)

4. Hosted Voice Mail and Unified Messaging: Integrating Exchange Online with an on-premises PBX to provide a single inbox for voice mail and email

5. Improved Blackberry Administration: Provide a web-based Blackberry Enterprise Server administration portal to enable customers to perform common administration functions without having to submit a service request

6. SharePoint Enterprise Features: Anonymous access and extranet capability, cross site-collection search, BI features, “social” features like tagging and more

7. OC Conferencing and Voice: Converge instant messaging, voice and conferencing in Office Communicator 8. Server-Service Parity: Provide the same rich features of Exchange Server, SharePoint Server and Office Communications Server whether hosted or on-premises

9. More Configuration Control: Remote Powershell, large batch processing, more control over policies and settings

10. More API’s and application integration opportunities

11. Public Folder support with Exchange Online

12. Email-enabled lists in SharePoint Online.