Have heard that the SharePoint Online “in the cloud” offering (S+S) will be rolled out/available some time in early 2009.
Here’s a bit more about SharePoint Online :
Microsoft SharePoint Online provides a highly secure, central location where employees can efficiently collaborate with team members, find organizational resources, manage content and workflow, and gain the business insight to make better-informed decisions.
Based on Microsoft Office SharePoint Server 2007, this Microsoft-hosted solution helps employees create and manage custom team and project-focused intranet sites for collaboration and document sharing.
Users get the flexibility and customization they need to truly work efficiently across teams with tools like wikis, blogs, surveys, shared workspaces, and process workflows.
And as a seamless extension of the Microsoft Office system, SharePoint Online is familiar and easy to use, and it enables collaboration within the applications your users already know.
There’s a document on the MSDN / Microsoft downloads site relating to Service Level Agreements (SLA) :
Will be interesting to see/hear more about this, as another offering for customers.
Currently, we look to eMantra for SharePoint hosting – mainly with regard to Internet (publishing) sites.
Can work out to be about $500 per month – not bad when you consider the licensing aspects of SharePoint – and costs of the license for “Internet Connector”.
Of course, you can’t deploy any custom code/webparts for this scenario – would be more likely to be $2,000 per month for a dedicated server.
Will have to wait and see the costings for the Microsoft hosted scenario.
Watch this space.
🙂