SharePoint On Premise and Exchange Server in the Cloud

Today’s Buzz word in the IT CIO’s agenda is “Cloud” (Cloud Computing). Even I just heard a few days back about the Ash Cloud which was a Big thing and attained a lot of attention worldwide. In My opinion any thing realted to Cloud is always a Big thing.

Recently I was asked to do the research and submit a summary report on the combination of SharePoint on Premise and Exchange Server as a hosted option in the Cloud.

First thing what I know is that Microsoft has the BPOS for SMB’s as SaaS. This comes with a bundled up package of SharePoint, Exchange and Office Live meeting.

But our major concern is where do we stand if we go for Exchange Azure and have our SharePoint on premise. We have been using Groupwise for almost quite some time till today and migrating from Groupwise to MS Exchange in the Cloud may not be as easy as it looks. I suspect most of us won’t get there without a significant amount of help, time, and money.

So we decided to do additional research on closing the loop between SharePoint on Premise and Exchange Azure with all the deviations, Complaince and Complaints. One thing we wanna make sure is we wouldn’t be asked for any additional tools to integrate the On Premise SharePoint data to the Exchange Cloud.

Any help in this regard is greatly appreciated.

Will update the content as soon as we finalize the report and having all possible solutions in hand.

After speaking to Jason Medero and couple of other SharePoint folks at the NJSPUG today, there shouldn’t be any problem talking to your outlook client as long as the active directory user profile info has been tied up with the respective email ids.