Many of my reader are asking about how to use sharepoint on cloud and support. So i decided to write one short article on this. Recently microsoft announced Sharepoint Online(It is part of Office 360). As we know there are 3 ways to run SharePoint.

  1. On premises, you buy the servers, and you run the servers.
  2. Hosted servers, where you don’t run the servers, but you let a hosting company run dedicated servers.
  3. SharePoint online – this is what I am talking about in this article. Also known as SaaS (Software as a Service).

The advantages of a cloud solution are undeniable.

  1. Availability, (SharePoint line offers a 99.9% uptime SLA)
  2. Reliability.
  3. Cost. Due to economies of scale, and no need to hire specialized dedicated staff.
  4. Scalability.
  5. Security.
  6. Flexibility – grow or shrink as you need to.

If you are seriously considering SharePoint 2010 in the cloud, there are some things you need to know about SharePoint online before starting using it.

What will work –

  • OOTB Customization, collaboration features etc. will work
  • SharePoint Designer 2010 is supported, so no code workflows will work
  • Visual Studio sandbox solutions, client object model will work.

What won’t work –

  • SharePoint 2010 online cloud environment supports only sandbox solutions.
  • BCS, business connectivity services is not supported in SharePoint online. What you can do however is to host your services in Azure, and call them using Silverlight.
  • Custom timer jobs will not work.

I would like to write long article once MS release the Sharepoint online to public. By that time let me explore some more points 😛

Similar Topics: