Sharepoint 2010 is due for release around April time 2010 and the Online version will become available through BPOS around September time I do believe.
When the 2010 version of Sharepoint (and Exchange & OCS) hit online, they will be SO much more fully features than the current 2007 versions; they will in fact be almost the same! This will be especially notable with Sharepoint as their is a large disparity at the moment:
Read Comparison of Sharepoint Server & Sharepoint Online
Sharepoint Online 2010 will include all the Business Intelligence (BI) aspects such as:
- Excel Services
- Forms Server
- Dashboards
- Key Performance Indicators (KPI’s)
and more 🙂 As a BPOS Partner this is great news…the BI features are becoming more interesting to more people and not having these features can be quite a big barrier to Sharepoint Online adoption. That’ll all change next year which is great news 🙂
Licensing
Wave 14 will bring some changes to the BPOS licensing too…there will be Standard and Enterprise USLS…just as there are for the on-premise CALs.
However, the split of features between the 2 will be decidedly different. The Enterprise CAL will include:
FAST Enterprise Search
There are also rumblings that it will include some part of, or ways of linking to, Microsoft’s Data Warehousing technology “Project Madison”. This would certainly fit with the BI capabilities inside Sharepoint…
I’ll be doing a post dedicated to Madison soon so keep your eyes peeled for that 🙂
This is all great news, for partners, customers and Redmond as, come H2 of 2010, Sharepoint Online will be a formidable challenger in the world of S+S/SAAS BI and should be pretty great. I, for one, am excited 🙂
Props to W Cornwill for the Britney pic!
Cloudy with a chance of Licensing 