BPOS, Microsoft’s Online Services offering, obviously plugs in to their Office suites but there are restrictions about which versions you can use. Currently Office 2003/2007 & 2010 are all supported but, once the new online release happens, that will change.
Based on current rules, partners are expecting Office 2003 support to end by early 2011 but, based on the MS Online Service post here, that may not be the case:
“We are currently investigating Office 2003 support and will publish a list of supported capabilities in the future”
which indicates at least some functionality will still be available to organizations running Office 2003. There are a HUGE number of reasons why upgrading to 2010 is a great idea, but that’s for another time 🙂
The full list of supported products is:
Operating Systems:
*Windows XP Home and Windows Media Center edition are supported but will not support federated identity.
Office Client:
*Office client is not required for customers who choose browser-only access. Office Communicator ‘14’ will be generally available later this year.
Browser:
- Internet Explorer 8 for Windows XP
- Internet Explorer 7 or higher for Windows Vista and Windows 7
- Firefox 3.x
- Safari 4.x
- Internet Explorer 7 or later
- Firefox 3 or later
- Safari 3 or later on Macintosh OS X 10.5
- Chrome 3 or later
- Internet Explorer 5.5 or later
- Firefox 2 or later
- Safari 3 or later
- Opera
The news that Office 2003 won’t be killed off completely is good news, as it allows partners to position BPOS separately to Office upgrades…and allows customers to keep the costs apart!
Cloudy with a chance of Licensing 