Power Protection FEATURED ARTICLE

Microsoft’s (News - Alert) Business Productivity Online Suite (BPOS) has had a bout of trouble these past few weeks. Recently, BPOS experienced hardware failure which contributed to downtime for three hours. The cloud’s customers in the U.S. and London were affected and updated through social media channels.

This the second recent BPOS SaaS (News - Alert) offering outage, and Microsoft cloud execs are crossing their fingers that Office 365, the successor to the Business Productivity Online Suite, does not face the same problems.

Through the BPOS service, Microsoft offers Microsoft Exchange Online for email and calendaring, Microsoft SharePoint Online for portals and document sharing and Microsoft Office Communications Online and Office Live Meeting.

Google (News - Alert) apps leader Rajen Sheth told businessinsider.com that he thought BPOS was experiencing problems because it was not originally designed to be offered as a cloud-type service. Instead, it was originally hosted on site.

He said Microsoft has had to rebuild the underlying software to overcome issues seen with growth of its hosted solution.

Microsoft’s online services forum allowed users to share experiences of using BPOS, and after this latest outage, most postings were negative.

"I'm very disappointed in BPOS, this is the fourth down in two months and this is supposed to be reliable. We went from in house group wise [sic] to hosted Microsoft BPOS, not only [are we] getting culture shock, we're getting down-time," said one.

Another said, "We are going to stick it out through the Office 365 transition out of pure masochism, but it's doubtful we'll bring any of our clients to MS hosted applications in the foreseeable future."

Minuteman UPS/Para Systems (News - Alert), a leader in power protection products, continues to promote why it is so important to embrace power protection technologies as outages like these continue. The company’s legacy products have been successful in businesses purchasing an uninterruptible power supply (UPS) as well as an additional battery pack so business can continue operating through extended power outages.

For those that recognize the importance of power protection, Minuteman is the company to turn to, according to Minuteman’s Director of Marketing, Bill Allen. The company, founded in 1982, has sold its power protection technologies in more than 100 countries throughout the world.