Microsoft BPOS Faces Another Outage

Microsoft's Business Productivity Online Suite (BPOS) string of outage woes continues with another outage on Tuesday.

The 'service disruption' affected users across North America and primarily threw the BPOS Services Health Dashboard and online e-mail service out of gear.

Microsoft Online's Twitter account stated: Service restored for #BPOS. Customers reporting ability to access services. Dashboard updated.

An earlier tweet which defined the problem said: BPOS ops investigating alerts of email connectivity issues affecting Americas. Nxt update in 30 mins.

The outage follows a similar disruption to BPOS service which occurred in June. The incident occurred just days before Microsoft launched the BPOS successor, the Office 365 globally on June 28. The network hardware issues resulted in clients not being able to access the Service Health Dashboard and Exchange mailboxes.

Microsoft BPOS a set of messaging and collaboration tools, delivered as a subscription service. However, the BPOS service is no longer available for sale as Microsoft has rolled out the Office 365. The Office 365 bundles Microsoft Office, Microsoft SharePoint Online, Microsoft Exchange Online and Microsoft Lync Online services and offers them online or as a cloud-service.

ZDNet reported that Tuesday's outage was associated with Exchange Online which is the cloud manifestation of Exchange. Microsoft said that the Exchange Online component in Office 365 will be better than BPOS multi-tenant architecture has been weaved into its core.

Microsoft's cloud offering Office 365 directly competes with Google Apps.

The Register reported that outages related to BPOS will diminish with Office 365. It reported Peter King, Microsoft UK SME cloud lead as saying: Office 365 with 2010 technology was designed from the ground up to be multi-tenanted - cloud, on-premise and hosted environments - and by the nature that it is designed to work in those environments, it will be more resilient.

However, King confirmed that though service disruption in Office 365 will reduce compared to BPOS, outages will still happen. Thus, as a remedy Microsoft under its SLAs offers money back guarantee to its clients under such circumstances.