Microsoft Online and SBS 2003

I have been working with the Microsoft BPOS aka Microsoft Online guys in Enterprise accounts for a while to help big companies migrate to BPOS dedicated. Don’t know what that is? Check out www.microsoftonline.com. To sum it up, it is hosted Exchange, SharePoint, OCS, LiveMeeting, and a few other offerings. For bigger businesses, Microsoft sets up dedicated hosting servers, for small it is multitenant.

I help out a small company from time to time because they have 15 employees and a Small Business Server 2003 environment. They are constantly running out of space on their 5 year old server because mail boxes keep growing because of attachment sizes. These guys are the perfect scenario to migrate to Microsoft Online!

So, I setup a free trial and started loading some of the coexistence tools like email sync and dirsync onto the Small Business server. Well, that was the plan. Turns out, dirsync can’t be run on a domain controller and will only run on Windows Server 2003. I think the BPOS guys missed the Small Businesses aren’t going to have an extra server lying around. How can you miss this scenario when building your tools, especially a segment of the market so perfect for BPOS?

So, they will have to forgo the coexistence and migrate mailboxes in one fell swoop over a weekend, which won’t be pretty over the small network connection they have.

I am sure there are technical reasons, and that's what will be used as an excuse. It just disappoints me when we have really smart guys that miss such a big opportunity to help small businesses.