I put together a quick webcast that reviews the Microsoft Business Productivity Online Suite (BPOS for short) and how it can address some of the unique scenarios facing the hospitality industry. BPOS is Microsoft’s cloud based productivity offering which is essentially Exchange (email), SharePoint (portal and collaboration), LiveMeeting (web conferencing) and Office Communicator (IM) hosted in the Microsoft datacenter and delivered as a service.

Given the highly distributed and heavily franchised organizational model within hospitality, a cloud-based service addresses a number of issues that hoteliers, restaurants and similar companies face all the time. There a lot of benefits to such an approach. Here are three that come immediately to mind:

• Enable better and consistent communication throughout an organization
• Corporate communications
• Between properties
• With staff and team members on property
• On-property, off-property, at home or mobile
• Improved communication and perception with guests
• Provide a centrally managed and secure environment
• Franchisee’s, properties/stores and staff already communicate and collaborate electronically
• The just do it via a variety of consumer-focused sites and services (i.e. GMail, Hotmail, AIM, iDrive, etc)
• None of these services is managed or controlled by the brand or necessarily secure
• Opportunities for new services revenue billed out to the properties/stores
• Solutions can be Corporate hosted, Microsoft-hosted or 3rd party hosted

So give the video a look. I hope it spurs some thought. To support this webcast, we also have a new Business Productivity Online Suite for Hospitality landing page. You can find lots of additional info on BPOS and potential uses in the industry.