BPOS Experts: Giving MSPs a Better Handle on Microsoft's Cloud?

Problem: Migrating Exchange or SharePoint data to a Microsoft BPOS cloud-delivered productivity suite apparently can be costly and time-consuming. Enter BPOS Experts, a New York City-based company that’s offering their BPOS Commander management and migration solution completely free. Here’s the scoop.

BPOS Commander itself is a Windows application that administrators can use to plan a BPOS migration, order a subscription or a trial, migrate Microsoft Exchange and SharePoint data to the cloud, and manage users, content, subscriptions, and capacity.

More interesting is the reason they offer it for free: BPOS Experts itself resells BPOS services, and uses their margins to fund development of Commander. The caveat to the free offer is that BPOS Experts has to be the Partner of Record on any deployment it manages.

It’s a clever way to get enterprises to buy into their BPOS services, and who can argue with free? Providing tools like this is exactly the kind of cloud differentiator that’s going to help MSPs stay relevant in increasingly cloudy times.

During the recent Microsoft Worldwide Partner Conference 2010 (WPC10), MSPmentor spotted quite a few BPOS-oriented consulting tools and technologies. We’ll strive to cover them in the days ahead.

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