SharePoint 2010: A More Viable Cloud Option

Cloud-based software solutions have become an increasingly viable alternative to on-premise solutions for many organizations. In fact, 24% of respondents in Forrester's Enterprise And SMB Software Survey, North America And Europe, Q4 2009, showed a strong preference for software-as-a-service over on-premise deployment. The option of avoiding the hassles of an on-premise SharePoint implementation altogether and going straight to the cloud can be intriguing. The problem to date has been that cloud-based SharePoint, either standalone or as part of Microsoft's Business Productivity Online Suite (BPOS) has had significant limitations when compared to an on-premise implementation. SharePoint 2010 closes the gap in functionality between the deployment options and opens up SharePoint Online to a wider range of applications — but for some, it still won't completely wipe out the need for on-premise SharePoint infrastructure.