I’ve been following the MS Software + Services stuff for a while now, and a post by Steve Clayton yesterday got me thinking about it again. Skydrive and Office Live Workspace seem to me to be great little products, and free ones at that. With Broadband now common place at home and services such as the Three mobile broadband now offering proper ‘anywhere’ connectivity targeted at consumers, cloud services now really make sense.
How does this relate to work? Well having worked within big SharePoint deployments and knowing first hand the amount of effort it can take to get a working solution for a big company, the idea of SharePoint Online really appeals to me. For the most part MOSS deployments are centralised, so for most users it’ll make little difference whether their docs are in our data centre or Microsoft’s. With Exchange and OCS also available as Online services, it becomes a very interesting proposition. I’m guessing there’ll be challenges around authentication and identity (to name a few), but they shouldn’t be anything that MS can’t solve with federation and ILM, solutions already in their portfolio.
Exciting times ahead… (Well for a geek). 
