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Tuesday, 24 May 2011 20:22 |
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In a display of its inexperience in the cloud space, Microsoft's Business Productivity Online Suite (BPOS) experienced a rocky two weeks. It all began on Tuesday, May 10, when BPOS's Exchange service experienced an email traffic issue which caused delays of up to 6-9 hours for some customers. The problem reoccurred on May 13, and this time caused delays of up to 3 hours for some users. As if that wasn't enough, the same day Microsoft BPOS also experienced a failure in Domain Name Service (DNS) that prevented users from accessing Outlook Web Access hosted in the Americas and partially impacted some functionality of Microsoft Outlook and Microsoft Exchange ActiveSync devices. The icing on the cake was when on May 19, users of BPOS mail served from the Americas servers again experienced issues, and some users experienced a delay of upto one hour. Some portion of the media reacted by going up in arms and finding fault in the cloud approach itself. Some felt that a hybrid approach was better, while others felt that the cloud was just not mature enough yet. But when problems persisted, it was evident that it wasn't a cloud issue, but more a Microsoft issue. It reveals Microsoft's inexperience in deploying cloud solutions, which is understandable since its mainstay has been its on premise products over the years. These issues hurt Microsoft as it prepares for the launch of its Office 365, and positions itself as one of the biggest evangelists of the cloud.  This reminds customers that Microsoft is not invincible, and still finding its way in the cloud era. Customers may do well by considering alternatives to BPOS which have more experience in the cloud arena.Â
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