At the beginning of March, Microsoft announced the international availability of its Business Productivity Online Suite, reports our sister site BusinessCloud9.com [1].

The suite is based around online versions of Microsoft Exchange and SharePoint, which handle email and web portals, plus Office Communications Online, a hosted unified communications system and the Office Live Meeting web conferencing application. From now until April, free trial access is available for up to 20 users in an organisation. When it goes commercial in April, UK users will pay £10.04 per user, per month for the service.

Microsoft is also introducing a Cloud-based Deskless Worker Suite to let non-PC users communicate with colleagues and managers via Office Online and SharePoint. This additional service will cost an additional £2.01 per user/month in the UK.

When the next Microsoft Office 14 [2] release arrives, it too will be available as a Cloud application tied into SharePoint Server.

In a background interview [3] on the new initiative, Microsoft business division president Stephen Elop reaffirmed the company's recent strategy to create a new infrastructure, code-named
Azure [4], to support Cloud-based applications across a range of devices.

"This Cloud platform will also offer enterprises a choice of how they want to manage their own data and applications," Elop explained. "They can host them on-premises, on their own servers, or they can have Microsoft or other companies host it for them in our state of the art data centres."

Expanding on how the Business Productivity Online and Azure strategies would tie into the Microsoft Dynamics application families, UK Dynamics product marketing director Gary Turner told AccountingWEB, "Increasingly you'll see a number of initiatives such as Dynamics CRM Online and other online stuff rolling out that share the same denominator - an online Microsoft data centre, available per month, will be a viable alternative to buying business services."

The "touchpoint" between on premise and hosted Dynamics applications will be SharePoint, he added. "SharePoint is a key foundation of the Dynamics strategy; there's a logical tie-up there and future waves of Dynamics ERP will converge over the next few years around it."

With Bill Gates now dedicating his time to his charitable foundation, Microsoft is going through some major reorganisations of its Office, Online and business intelligence applications. Last month, for example, it subsumed the PerformancePoint Server into an Office SharePoint Server Enterprise [5] product group.

Also rustling in the undergrowth is Gemini [6], an Excel-based interface that will plug into Microsoft SQL Server and Access data sources to let users instantly create pivot tables and other analytical views.

Dynamics UK product director Gary Turner said that Microsoft's ERP families would be a logical place to focus the company's BI strategy, but explained that BI extended to a much wider audience than Dynamics users. "We couldn't hog it, so makes sense to make it vendor independent and put it into the SharePoint Server team, because that's where all informatino will be consumed from the user viewpoint," he said.

"Having acquired [ProClarity] two years ago, the dust has settled around where to sit it. I would love it to serve the Dynamics business exclusively, but Microsoft also has to service third party ERP vendors."