Microsoft Launches Office 365 Cloud Suite

An anonymous reader writes "Microsoft took its cloud suite Office 365 out of beta today and the opinion mongers are in overdrive. Is Office 365 missing features, is it too complex, or should it be taken seriously? And how does it stack up against Google Apps?"

Comments

We use it here

[liquidweaver]

and have been for the last two months. I use linux on my desktop, it's nice to be able to have access to the web apps, since I can't very well install the software. Also, the big thing you need to consider when deploying this - If you use the migration tool and link your AD accounts with Office365, you cannot ever get rid of your local AD because you won't be able to manage your users. We chose to export each user to a PST, and import their PST's into their new Office365 account now that we are one step closer to dumping our expensive and bloated local MS infrastructure.

Re:We use it here

[lymond01]

Not the original poster, but one advantage of Office365 is that you can tie it in with the Cloud AD. The MS infrastructure hardware is run somewhere else to manage your systems, and you use the same authentication for Office 365 access. And as the user mentioned there's Lync which is chat/video like Google, but also allows VOIP, voicemail transcription, etc.

Re:We use it here

[djlowe]

Clicked Submit by mistake. The rest of this: We're looking at cloud services as an adjunct, and *maybe* a replacement for our current backup scheme... but nothing more than data backup, ever.

We already have the needed hardware/infrastructure, personnel, recovery in place to ensure 24/7 operations, and we cannot risk losing control of that, as millions of dollars in service contracts with SLAs, etc., would be at stake if we did so.

For us, "the cloud" means in current parlance: "Store all your mission critical data on third-party storage, and then have to rely upon them for availability that we've not only already created, but cannot ultimately ensure nor control, regardless of contracts with them".

And that's just the operational/production side of the equation. Then there's security issues, privacy issues, etc.

Sorry, ain't gonna happen, not any time soon.

Call me old-fashioned, but all things considered, a "mass migration" to the cloud, company-wide would be a very bad thing for us at this point, despite internal pressure: I've had sales people in our company ask "So, when are we moving everything to the cloud?"... as though that was a magical solution to our problems: We're growing, rapidly, you see, and they see it as a "magic bullet" to address file server storage constraints, mailbox size limitations (one of our sales person's Exchange mailbox is 4GB... and he refuses to archive it, despite his own admission that he's not needed the email dating back nearly 8 years, ever).

Attempts to explain that doing so would involve the need for enormous increases in external bandwidth at all of our offices, with commensurate cost to ensure availability fall on deaf ears: For them, bandwidth is "magic" - they get faster Internet access at home, you see, and repeatedly tell us that, and they simply cannot understand why we don't switch to "local consumer broadband provider" for all of our needs, based upon their experience at home.

Anyway: Moving to the cloud might be viable for some companies, but it's not for us.

Regards,

dj

Re:Ribbon?

[liquidweaver]

Does it have the horrible ribbon thing that the newer versions of Office have? If so, I think it will have a hard time catching on (I tried that "See How it Works" link on their site but they wanted me to install Silverlight). No one I know took OOo or Symphony seriously until MS came out with the ribbon interface. It was at that point they felt the need to see what type of competition was out there.

The web app versions of Word and Excel look very similar to their desktop counterparts, including the damn ribbon. The rich version of Outlook does not for whatever reason.