Office 365 + Social 24/7 = SharePoint and Social Sites in the Cloud

Just a few hours ago Microsoft introduced Office 365, a bold new product that offers a complete, online combination of its award-winning Exchange, Office Pro Plus and Web Apps, Lync, and SharePoint collaboration and unified communication software. Office 365 will expand Microsoft’s market by not only addressing the needs of smaller organizations, but also by capturing a portion of the 85% of IT budgets not spent on software – all while saving their customers money. It’s a very smart move. As a Microsoft partner, we are very excited about this new dynamic office productivity suite because it opens up a great number of opportunities for NewsGator Social Sites 2010.

Social Sites is a software solution that adds powerful Enterprise 2.0 features – like microblogging, activity streams, mobile, desktop, advanced RSS, ideation, and community capabilities – to Microsoft SharePoint. In addition to being chosen as one of Microsoft’s top-three finalists for 2010 ISV Partner of the Year, we are able to work very closely with them and have been involved in their cloud evolution every step of the way, making today’s announcement no surprise to us. We have customers already running on Microsoft’s cloud version of SharePoint, and as always, we are committed to making SharePoint more social – both in the cloud and on-premise.

What does Office 365 mean to you? For smaller organizations, it means the benefits of SharePoint, Office, Exchange and Lync will be available without the IT burden.  As smaller companies start to leverage these tools, the opportunities for collaboration with other companies get really interesting.  For larger organizations, Office 365 presents a great way to provide the right licensing for all the different types of workers and use cases that exist in big companies. What’s more exciting to us is that Office 365 opens the door to some very cool inter-organization collaboration that previously would have been more difficult.

Imagine a large organization, running Social Sites and SharePoint 2010 on premise, that wants to collaborate with their customers, partners or suppliers in an easy, secure way.  Normally, this would require the company to deploy servers in an extranet and then manage user accounts and access. However, Office 365 offers the promise of an extended environment with single sign-on and easily managed access for trusted outsiders. At NewsGator, as we think about how modern knowledge workers get things done across the boundaries of their company and personal relationships (see recent blog post), we get very excited about the potential of Office 365 to be a critical part of that infrastructure.

Office 365 will be available worldwide next year. Starting today, Microsoft will begin the beta program with a few thousand organizations in 13 countries and regions around the world. NewsGator is excited about Office 365 because it will make a huge impact on organizations of all size, and that excites us because we see lots of opportunities to leverage it and add value. We make SharePoint social, and we will continue to do so, no matter where you find it.