Cloud Services Blog & Newsroom

Champion is dedicated to educating customers on Microsoft Cloud and Office 365, the forthcoming successor to BPOS, and helping with the transition from Microsoft BPOS to Office 365.

If I had one word to describe the administration of your environment on Microsoft’s cloud, it would be simplicity.  Some might say that it’s only simple because you don’t have the access to do deep dive configuration.  However, with this quadruple redundant infrastructure and management of the hardware taken from your “plate,” you don’t need any of that.  All that really needs to be done from the administration standpoint is configuring the user accounts, setting permissions, and turning on or off communicator.

Personally, I liked the fact that the administration of your cloud environment could be done from one single interface.  At least that is what I thought until I was asked questions about archiving, encryption, and spam settings.  These are all on separate pages.  Which is not a big deal, except they all require a login.  In turn each login could potentially have a different password and therefore different password expirations.  This has the potential to be an issue for quite a few people.  However, once everything has been configured, you shouldn’t need to get into anything but the spam filter and the admin center.

All in all, I would say that BPOS is going to be an adjustment to the administrators.  The reason I say that is because no IT professional is going to like you taking away their deep dive hands on configuration.  It is what they know and are used to.  But there’s no doubt that as they become more and more familiar with the portals and realize how much time it has freed up, they will soon become number one advocates. 

Of course this is just one administrator’s opinion.  I encourage you to share your BPOS experience.

--Dillon C. Semer, Technical Assessment Consultant for Champion Soutions Group

Introducing “Wake Up Wednesdays” training seminars for existing Microsoft Online Services customers.  Join Jim Canfield, Microsoft Online Services Specialist, for upcoming 30-minute interactive training sessions to help you get the most out of your BPOS investment.

I just got off the Microsoft Office 365 announcement, and up off the floor. This announcement blew me away!!!  This really levels the playing field for the small and medium business to compete with the big boys.  No longer will large companies have a leg up over small businesses when it comes to communication and collaboration with teammates or clients. As a matter of fact, the small business might even have an advantage because they don't have the on premise legacy systems and personnel issues to deal with. Let's take a quick overvew of what was announced today.

First, I would like to state that I am the CEO of Champion Solutions Group and we help clients use the Microsoft Cloud to help reduce costs and improve productivity.  But at our core, like many of you, my company is a mid-market enterprise.  We have  130 great employees located in 11 states; we rely heavily on email and collaboration to support our clients, and we are headquartered in Boca Raton, Florida--a place prone to natural disasters, in our case, hurricanes.