Fast forward four years. It’s 2009. Remember that you’re Sara, the CIO of a mid-to-large retail company. You have many accomplishments that the business leadership team (and Board of Directors) has recognized: a streamlined supply-chain management system that reduces costs and out-of-stock conditions in stores, expanded your ecommerce presence to Europe, and improved the service levels of your major mission critical applications substantially as well as most of your “tier 2” applications, to name a few. Internally, you recognized that to have accomplished these goals for the business, changes within your IT group had to be made: You examined the IT processes that historically were either poorly performing or not defined and created programs and training for staff to implement IT management processes based on ITIL You virtualized most of your data center except for your mission critical applications and large database systems You implemented an IT service management management function that resulted in a robust but practical and usable configuration management database (CMDB) You created an SLA enforcement mechanism for your critical applications that has the effect of notifying your systems operations center when mission critical application components fail As a result, sales are up, costs are noticeably lower, and service quality is significantly improved. Life is sunny. Until the clouds come (sorry, I just had to put that in!) The implementation of your online presence in Europe has increased the traffic to your site infrastructure by 20%. Moreover, this move results in many holiday specialty items. While your ecommerce infrastructure (web site, fulfillment, inventory, and supply chain) has generally kept up with demand, it has struggled with performance and scaling issues during the holiday season. Also, the annual operational cost of the data center is quite high due to the need to support seasonal demands. This new expansion is stressing your servers even more at peak and, though you’ve grown capacity to meet the demand, your CFO is putting pressure on you to cut operational costs. As you look at your utilization reports in February and March, noting the significantly low traffic that your servers are getting, you know a change needs to be made. To solve the performance issues and the overall seasonality challenge that’s causing significant annual operating costs, you form a task force to investigate the implementation of a private cloud environment. While you believe this will potentially solve the performance and scale issues, you’ve come up with more questions than answers. On the plus side, cloud technologies promise significant scalability benefits (elasticity) to be able to more effectively handle the seasonality concerns, including scaling back services when demand is low. This plan could also result in improvements in your ability to deliver services on demand by deploying ready-made virtual machines for web and application servers. However, many questions persist: What model do I choose: PaaS, IaaS, or some combination? If I choose infrastructure as a service, how do I guarantee the quality of the resulting applications? If I go with platform as a service, what standard services do I put in place that will promote agility without sacrificing quality? How do I enable flexibility and not compromise compliance? Will it be cost-effective? I have a charge-back model today for the services I provide to various lines of business. How will I need to redefine that model so I can keep costs in line? How will it affect my service delivery? Right now now I have a pretty well-defined service management system that helps me keep my critical apps up. Will there be significant VM sprawl as a result of the elasticity I should be getting? If so, how will that affect my ability to manage this sprawl for my critical applications. Heck, I just finished getting a handle on my tier 2 apps. Will I lose control of those? If you haven’t gathered by now, there are themes here that the War on Cost team has been exploring and discussing for some time across a variety of scenarios. They are the enduring business value pillars of reducing costs, improving agility, improving quality of service, improving governance and compliance, and managing risk. All of these value dimensions are in play with the introduction of a cloud paradigm. In fact, they have the potential to be amplified: Agility – Possibly the value pillar with the highest potential amplitude. The cloud paradigm (whether public, private, or something in between) has the potential for extreme agility. Automatically provisioning development, test, and production environments in a matter of minutes or hours instead of days or weeks has enormous potential Costs – Costs have the potential to be dramatically reduced by providing a commoditized set of services that can be automatically commissioned and decommissioned at will. Also, server utilization can be significantly improved through intelligent load balancing as demands for the service change, particularly due to seasonal demands from stores and online traffic Quality of Service – QoS in all its forms (reliability, scalability, performance, availability, etc.) can be greatly improved by intelligently and dynamically load balancing workloads across (potentially large) arrays of servers running as VMs on a farm of servers that are well-utilized Governance, Compliance, and Risk Management (GRC) – These three are related values and the cloud offers huge potential benefits here too. As services are defined (whether its infrastructure, platform, or software), they are standardized (one of the main tenets of cloud computing). Standardization has the natural implication of introducing governance and compliance regulations, which, in turn, has a direct net benefit to managing risk But, and it’s a really big but, what about complexity? You’re thinking about the sheer number of VMs that can get spun up in your data center. Where once you had a hundred or so servers, you now have somewhere between five hundred and a thousand VMs (you’re not really sure). Will implementing cloud exacerbate that VM growth? How can I contain it? How much should I contain it? So, therein lies the challenge before you: if you’re going to move to a private cloud because you and your business leadership team see the potential for huge benefits, how will you manage the complexity introduced by this cloud to be able to maintain and enhance your IT team’s ability to deliver for the business? What do you think? Do these ideas ring true with you? Are there other major considerations to weigh? Let us know what your experience has been. Have you answered these questions for your organization? Don’t be shy. We want to hear from you. All the best, Erik, Strategist, War on Cost

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

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.

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 four companies moving to the cloud with Microsoft, and an upcoming webcast for Lync. 1. Microsoft reels in new Office 365 and BPOS cloud customers Our first BPOS story sums up the last couple of weeks of Microsoft cloud news. Microsoft has been on track to bringing new customers to the cloud with the recent announcement of four more companies making the journey. Shell, Manpower, Tampa General Hospital and Advocate Health Care all chose Microsoft, and InfoWorld breaks down each company’s migration story here . 1. Tampa General Hospital – One of the largest hospitals in Florida is making the switch from Lotus Notes to BPOS. 2. Manpower, Inc. – This large temp agency has 30,000 employees and 400,000 clients per year. By the end of this year, 80% of its user base will be running in the Cloud with Exchange Online. “That’s three years to migrate 30,000 employees.” 3. Advocate Health Care – This health care company will migrate over 27,000 employees from iPlanet messaging and Lotus Notes to Exchange Online. You can read more about this company’s migration in this Microsoft Case Study . 4. Shell – Beginning in April, Shell will use SharePoint 2010. Shell is already a big proponent of SharePoint 2007 and this upgrade with help increase productivity. What do you think of the recent migration announcements? Leave your comments below. *Image from InfoWorld 2. Voice, Video, and Data Conferencing with Microsoft Lync Are you a Microsoft Lync user? Have you joined us for a Business Insights webcast? There is still time to register for our latest Microsoft webcast and learn more about Microsoft Lync 2010. In the webinar entitled Voice, Video, and Data Conferencing with Microsoft Lync you will learn how to increase your productivity and reduce costs with Lync. This webcast is presented by Bhavika Thakkar, Lync and Exchange Product Manager at Microsoft. The sixty minute webinar is set for Tuesday, March 22, 2011 AM Pacific Time. You can view our past BPOS webinars here and other Microsoft webcasts here . What webcast would you like to see? Leave your comments below or send us an email at bposcom@microsoft.com . 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

Get an overview of how the formatting system works in Windows PowerShell and learn how you can manipulate its formatting settings for more sophisticated, customized output .

Don Jones demonstrates how to use profiles in Windows PowerShell to automatically load modules and snap-ins, define functions, and customize the shell each time you open a new session. —————————————————————————————————— Follow our daily tips: • facebook.com/TechNetTips • twitter.com/TechNetTips • blogs.technet.com/tnmag ——————————————————————————————————

Don Jones looks at how you can use the pipeline to chain complex commands , making Windows PowerShell more than just a procedural scripting language. —————————————————————————————————— Follow our daily tips: • facebook.com/TechNetTips • twitter.com/TechNetTips • blogs.technet.com/tnmag ——————————————————————————————————

The Office 365 Blog just broke some very exciting news for Microsoft Online Services customers. BlackBerry mobile BES support is now free through BPOS! Allen Filush from the Office 365 blog explains in greater detail with this blog post . More information will be provided later this month for existing customers. Be sure to check out his entire blog copied below. – Josh Topal. —– We have exciting news for Microsoft Online Services customers. We are in the process of updating pricing for Hosted BlackBerry Service for Exchange Online to make this service available free of charge.

In part two of our BPOS Trial guide , we take a look at Microsoft Office Communications Online . Check out part one here . We hope you’re enjoying all of the dynamic functionality of BPOS including Exchange Online and SharePoint Online. Did you know that with your trial subscription, you can explore Office Communications Online? Office Communications Online brings security-enhanced instant messaging so that fast-paced, modern organizations can communicate and collaborate as efficiently as possible. These easy-to-use tools can be accessed by any user at virtually any time and are protected by world-class security features. For a recommended exercise to explore these tools, you can learn to add a contact to Office Communicator. Follow the next steps to add a contact to the Office Communicator client: 1. In the Microsoft Online Services Sign In application, click Instant Messaging to start Office Communicator. In Office Communicator, at the left side of the title bar, click the arrow to show the menu, point to Tools , and then click Add a Contact . 2. In the Add a Contact wizard, select Search for a contact, and then click Next . 3. Enter information for the person you want to add. You do not need to fill in every box. 4. In the search results, select the contact you want to add, click Next , and then click Finish . The user is added to your contact list. 5. Repeat steps as needed to add more people. We hope that you have enjoyed the chance to experience all that Microsoft Business Productivity Online Standard Suite has to offer. To continue the productivity, reliability, and accessibility, convert your trial to a paid subscription now .