As expected, today Microsoft had discontinued Office Live Small Business (“OLSB”) replacing the offering with Office365. Office365 provides business and consumers with basic productivity suite of products including limited functionality Office Webpps. According to Microsoft, they have done everything they could to provide Office Live Small Business users with...

Several hours ago, Google started sending emails to Google Apps users introducing Google Cloud Connect for Microsoft Office. The email provides an overview of the Cloud Connect concept and includes a direct download link for the Cloud Connect plugin.

On January 14th, Google posted Service Level Agreement (SLA) related data as it applies to Google Apps for both business and individual customers. In 2010, Gmail was available 99.984% of the time, which translates into approximately 7 minutes of downtime per month, and basically represents accumulation of small delays...

As a conclusion following a series of Microsoft BPOS outages over the past several weeks, on September 8th, Microsoft issued a statement on Microsoft Online Services Team Blog apologizing for recent outages that affected customers that use Microsoft hosted services such as Exchange Online and SharePoint Online. By issuing...

Thanks to yet another report by ZDNet’s Mary-Jo Foley, we keep learning about new occurrences of Microsoft BPOS outages following reports. According to the source, majority of Microsoft hosted services outages affect Exchange Online, Microsoft’s hosted Exchange service. By not addressing these issues swiftly, Microsoft is playing a dangerous game toying with consumer...

Mary-Jo Foley of ZDNet reports that Microsoft customers once again experience an outage of Microsoft BPOS hosted services for second time in a month. The outage lasted for approximately 90 minutes which is significant considering that during that time BPOS customers were unable to access their email, SharePoint site...

It seems that Microsoft cloud platform, BPOS is not immune to outages and is not as stable as they made us believe having bashed Google for outages associated with Google Apps services. On Monday August 23, 2010, Microsoft cloud services were inaccessible for approximately 2-hours. Read the full story...

Microsoft introduced several updates to free Office Apps. Now when you edit a document in Word, you can print the document without having to open it in the desktop application. Read the full story. Quick Poll

Microsoft Online Services – March BPOS Update On Friday March 26, 2010, Microsoft announced to its partners and resellers that Microsoft Online Services were significantly enhanced to provide BPOS (Business Productivity Online Suite) and Exchange Online Standard users with much larger mailboxes, increased number of SharePoint site collections, simplified...

As SaaS space heats-up, both Microsoft and Google are not wasting their time and put a ton of effort on developing additional features for their respective hosted offerings – Microsoft BPOS and Google Apps. In a blog post by Barb Mosher of CMS Wire, she speaks about increasing competition...