In the last couple months I’ve been dealing with a number of projects where moving to a Software-as-a-Service solution was an option.  With SaaS solutions, it’s very important to do a proper analysis of the technical, financial and risks for solutions.

While most SaaS solutions claim to be significantly cheaper than their on-premise solutions, doing a full analysis over the life of the product might surprise you.  For commodity services such as email, it’s often safe to assume the hosted solution will be cheaper.  For specialty products, this changes significantly.  At first it may look cheaper, but be sure to look deeper. (more…)

Anyone who I’ve talked to about cloud services knows I’m a big fan of Office 365.  One of its biggest adoption stumbling blocks is the lack of true Blackberry integration.  We’ve been told “it’s coming” since the first beta (then “60 days after general release”), but have been stood up so far.

When I saw the announcement last week of an open beta for Blackberry Cloud Services for Office 365, I got a little excited.  Several of my clients are anxiously awaiting this so they can retire old Exchange 2003 servers. (more…)

On Tuesday Microsoft announced general availability of Office 365, their next-generation hosted services platform.  The platform can include a range of services, including Exchange Server (email and calendaring), Sharepoint (collaboration), and Lync (instant messaging, voice and video conferencing).  Larger plans include email archiving and even PC-to-phone through Lync. (more…)