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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?"
It can't open my old Final Cut Pro projects.
What now, first missing feature, first too high complexity, or first taking seriously?
Or do you mean that when compared with Google Apps, Office 360 ranks first?
The Tao of math: The numbers you can count are not the real numbers.
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.
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Gives new meaning to "cloud kicker".
---- Teach Peace. It's Cheaper Than War.
Who do you want reading your docs? Google or Microsoft?
Neither, thanks.
We adopted MSFT's big-brand business suite, SharePoint 2010, several months before it launched last May. It took a full 6 months to set up the environment, plus additional time to make it even remotely useful for the enterprise. The level of in-house expertise and infrastructure needed to make a business run on MSFT products (Outlook, SharePoint, etc) is obscene.
And it's quickly becoming outdated, sorry MSFT.
At another business (I switched, thankfully!), we use Google Enterprise. The level of support we need to provide for e-mail and document collaboration is radically lower and feels fundamentally different. Instead of FIGHTING with our systems to keep them online, we can innovate and develop new and cool things because our time doesn't disappear into the black hole of "Correlation ID errors" and arcane Outlook glitches.
MSFT, I hope you learn what it means to provide cloud services, and do provide a worthy competitor to Google and other providers! Then, we'd have some exciting innovation! In the meantime, pah... sorry guys. I know you work VERY hard. But PLEASE tell Ballmer to step aside so you can do something that isn't designed by the Corporate Committee!
Open/Libre Office is free and that's what I use but to be fair it looks like this is a pretty good offering all things considered.
After suffering through the hell that is the web interface to Outlook, why would I waste my time with another steaming pile of Microsoft web UI? Fool me once, shame on you; fool me twice, shame on me.
... or as they call it, uptime in exess of five sevens.
FCKGW 09F9 42
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.
"From the depths of my skeptical and rationalist soul, I ask the Lord to protect me from California touchie-feeliedom."
I believe that there should be a free version for peronal use
There is one here.
"Maybe this world is another planet's hell"
Aldous Huxley
What do we do on day 366? And is that February 29? Or December 31? Or January 1? Help me, Microsoft!
It's okay: we won't have another leap day until 2016, so Microsoft didn't need to code that logic into their software. 365 days is enough for anyone.
Don't worry: in 2015, Microsoft will release a new version, Office 366, which will offer you the full yearly experience for only one of the cheap monthly prices listed below (assuming you pick the right plan)!
. /- $2/mo for Plan E
/ $4/mo for Plan K1
\ $6/mo for Plan P
< $10/mo for Plan E1 or K2
/ $16/mo for Plan E2
\ $24/mo for Plan E3
\- $27/mo for Plan E4
Pick your plan today, before it's too late. The 366th day cometh!
Really, it's not just competing with Google's offering. It's competing with Apple and anyone in the future that follows Apple's iCloud for Documents lead by using native apps as a front end for seamless cloud syncing behind the scenes. People have dinged Google Apps over the years because they're allegedly not as good as native apps (I'm not taking a stance on that either way in this comment), but there's a middle ground between an app that's either only on your machine or only on the web, and it looks like it has the potential to be the sweet spot, since it offers a fully native experience with the everywhere access brought by the cloud.
Can somebody please explain what the point of this is? I don't get it. A file server isn't complicated or expensive. I do own a small business, and I read all of the marketing stuff, but I can't find a single reason why I'd switch from plain ol' Office + fileserver + hosted Exchange. If anything, I'd have to spend MORE money on bandwidth.
I don't respond to AC's.
I stopped reading TFA at "For instance, the Office Web Apps version of PowerPoint doesn’t have the high-performance video editing tools found in the desktop version..." They actually used High-Performance and PowerPoint in the same sentence. You've got to be kidding me.
"Minimum requirements for Office 365 include Office 2007+, IE 7+, Windows XP SP3+ (see full requirement list below)."
What's the point of a SAS product that requires you to install the desktop version first...
There are some fundamental problems with this - the biggest of which is you can't use it unless you already have Office on your desktop. How did they not learn from this mistake the first time around?
Just FYI, you don't need any local software installed, in fact you don't even need windows. I have it open in a browser on my Debian laptop right now, Slashdot in another tab.
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Just FYI, you don't need any local software installed, in fact you don't even need windows. I have it open in a browser on my Debian laptop right now, Slashdot in another tab.
Do you have access to all functionality? If you go to Microsoft Office 365's system requirements page, it specifically lists certain versions of MS Office (and the Windows OS) as being requirements for this. At the very top of that page it states:
"To get the full Office 365 experience, we recommend that customers meet our system prerequisites. Minimum requirements for Office 365 include Office 2007+, IE 7+, Windows XP SP3+ (see full requirement list below)."
#DeleteChrome
Well, the specific package we have allows for us to download the Office 2010 native apps, which I'm not doing here of course. Maybe that's what the requirements are for. As far as functionality goes, I can create and edit all the MS formats, and the Outlook interface has all the features of the desktop version AFAICT, so I wouldn't take the requirements as a non-starter.
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you know, their ecommerce service which they suddenly announced to shut down, in the face of their clients who were using it for selling thousands of products big inventories for years ? suddenly and out of the blue, and gave them 1 month to migrate away from their proprietary, incompatible store format to anything else ? leaving aside what the domain/address situation would end up ?
why would any moron trust them with their sensitive, irreplaceable data ?
Read radical news here
I seriously doubt it. ANd if it does, my bet is that it will fail within 2 years.
I work in an organization where my department is all Linux, and the rest of the company is Windows XP or 7. Moving to Office 365 for me has been a benefit, actually, because with the exception of Lync I can access all the web versions of the apps using Iceweasel/Firefox in my linux machine. As far as Apple goes, I hear there is a web version of Lync you can use because Apple can run Silverlight. So, if like me you are all FOSS, the only thing you are missing out on is Lync.
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Missing features AND too complex. That one is a bit hard to do.
I agree with all the Sharepoint stuff. And cloud hosted documents is not a one-size-fits-all ... although I can see the benifit.
But ignore all that. Just look at Exchange Hosting. A company I'm with is paying about $14/month per user for Exchange hosting with ActiveSync (for iphone syncing) and a "vast" limit of 150MB/user mailbox. And thats with a year's commitment. For 7 users this is quite cheep compared to managing our own exchange server (complete with MS Server licensing and a M$PhD to administer it).
I tried the Office 365 beta and was up and running in minutes on my desktop , iPhone, and iPad with full exchange/outlook both native (all devices) and web. Pricing - $6/user with 25GB / mailbox.
Thats just seriously kick-a$$ pricing if your org wants exchange. (mine does, I tried moving us to pure IMAP but the boss likes his Outlook, contacts, calendars etc).
Its a flipping steal. As soon as were done with our (ignorantly signed 1 year contract last month) I'm moving us over to 365 ... unless the smoke has been let out in the meantime.
You can take your Sharepoint and web office apps .,... I just want full exchange/outlook for dirt cheep pricing.
-David
I believe that there should be a free version for peronal use, but this is still a great tool.
You're probably just a troll, but why should there be a free version for personal use when there isn't any "personal use" for the product? Pretty much everything you get from Office 365 is for collaborating and communicating with other people (SharePoint Server, Exchange Server, Lync, etc.). If all you want is the Office Web Apps, cloud storage from Microsoft, Webmail, and stuff like that, then there are other ways to get that from Microsoft free for personal use.
Breakfast served all day!
I know Word and Excel 2010, and Office 365 does not have the same functionality as Office 2010 for making documents and spreadsheets. It is is trimmed down version of Office 2010. It sounds like very few slashdotters here have learned about other changes since 2007 besides the ribbon (styles). I know it's hard to embrace moving away from the old menus that everyone is used to using. Try searching Google for a video and they will show you how to do anything you want to do. I found several videos on making a "Bar and Whisker" graph, a function that even Excel 2010 doesn't do without a work around.
Do you have access to all functionality?
Yes, you have access to it -- but "having the full Office 365 experience" means you're not limited to editing documents in Web-based apps, you can use the desktop Office suite. There are components that integrate the desktop Office apps with the Office 365 services (albeit not very well, in my experience). The catch is that you need Office 2007 or later. So what it's saying is, if you want the full experience, including the ability to use a real word processor, spreadsheet, etc., with Office 365's hosted services, then you will need to have Office 2007+ installed. Office 2003 won't work, just like OpenOffice won't work. If you don't have Office 2007+ installed, you can still use the Office 365 services, but you will not get "the full experience."
Also, there are some price tiers for Office 365 that include a copy of the desktop version of Office 2010 for every seat. You download the suite from the Office 365 servers and each copy is automatically licensed.
Breakfast served all day!
The only thing that still bugs me about it (and i use office 2007/2010 semi-regularly) is that icons change when i downsize the window. It kicks the familiarity i have with the interface in the balls almost every time, but Ive gotten used to it.
Sometimes I like the changes they have made, sometimes I still hate some of it. Ive used it so long, however, that looking for something in OOo or older versions of office is a waste of time. Ill never find what I want in those anymore. *snaps fingers* oh well.
By and large, language is a tool for concealing the truth. -- George Carlin
If you're comparing Sharepoint with Google Docs, I'm not sure you fully understand what Sharepoint brings to the table.
I'm actually wrapping up a Sharepoint 2010 installation this month. It's on time and budget. The company now has their entire Workflow process, including custom C# workflow/document rules that were developed specifically for their needs.
Google Docs and Sharepoints are not even similar products. If you can go with either for your needs, then by all means go with Google Docs. Because that means you're really not using Sharepoint properly.
... ducks
http://saveie6.com/
this does not take it to the next level... I'm not sure I could use excel without VBA or some scripting language. *shrug* ohh well, the cloud is dumb anyways.
All of the above was encrypted with a Quad ROT-13 method. Unauthorized decryption is in violation of the DMCA.
...Until I realized that Office 2010 is a much bigger version number. Beat that version number, Libre/OpenOffice!
That's typical software consulting in the Micorsoft ecosystem for you, just like that expensive unsupervised MS Exchange consultant that managed to set the mail servers at the company I was doing work for as an open fucking relay.
For how long? MS has a long history of Embrace, Extend, Extinguish. And they are now in Embrace.
I prefer the "u" in honour as it seems to be missing these days.
but does anyone else think it looks like Balmer's doing a "sieg heil" in the picture at ItWorld.com?
Here are some of my top grips with the Ribbon:
1. They could have grouped things more logically without disregarding 30 years of UI conventions (pull-down menus). Talk about throwing out the baby with the bathwater.
2. A great many of the things they've done in the ribbon that make sense I've actually had in my Word 97/2000/XP/2003 toolbar for something like a decade now. Yes, the stock Office toolbar had a crap layout. The solution was to fix that, not introduce a whole new everything. See #1.
3. I actually find it takes more mouse clicks when I'm working in the Ribbon than it does with my aforementioned custom toolbars. That's because I have to keep clicking back and forth between Ribbon tabs to get to the functions I actually need, whereas before they were all on the screen at one time.
4. #3 wouldn't be so bad if you could customize the Ribbon, but you can't. (At least, not in 2007. I guess in 2010 you can. If you bought 2007 like we did, too fscking bad.). All that effort at overhauling the UI and they still managed to make things worse.
5. They still have an "Insert" menu. That's a lazy catch-all if ever there was one. Totally misses the point of functional grouping. You should not go to "Insert" and then "Foo", because that means when you're working with other Foo's you'll be in some other tab. Instead have a "Foo" tab (or submenu or whatever) where you create/edit/delete/etc.
6. No next labels for most things means people who are text-oriented rather than picture-oriented have a harder time navigating.
7. No next labels for most things means it's harder to learn what stuff does. You have to point to and maybe even click on each thing, rather than just reading a simple English description.
8. No next labels for most things means you have to resort to trying to describe an icon over the phone. "Click the button that looks like a guy wearing a hat -- but not the one where he has a shovel, too".
9. No option to go back to the old style. In Vista you can still elect to use the menu from Windows 95, if that's what you want. But not Office, no, that would be too good for them. They can make it compatible with file formats from 15 years ago, but they can't make it compatible with human beings!
10. Behind the Ribbon icons, you still frequently encounter the same old tired, confusing, cluttered, mixed-up, poorly-documented dialog boxes that have been in Word for years. Some dialogs still mix settings for Word-as-a-whole vs the-current-document, for example.
11. Instead of dick-twiddling around with UI conventions, they could have been doing something more productive, like making lists in Word sane, or fixing the fscking "Page 1 of 1", "Page 2 of 2" bug that's been in Word since *at least* Word 97. A decade and a half later, and Microsoft still hasn't managed to teach a computer how to count.
I have more but I'm tired of typing.
dragonhawk@iname.microsoft.com
I do not like Microsoft. Remove them from my email address.
If you as an organization adopt Office 365, what is your plan for getting your data out if you must? In is easy, but out is hard.
Help stamp out iliturcy.
Office 365, Microsoft’s pay-as-you-go answer to Google Docs, delivers the same delight you’re used to from Office on your PC, only slower and clunkier and only working on Internet Explorer. Remember Internet Explorer? Of course you do!
Microsoft Online Services have marketed Office 365 directly to your bosses, who have little people like you to do all the bits that involve actually touching a computer. It promises a fully integrated solution to your daily working needs, with the reliability of Hotmail and Sidekick. That is, it promises it to your IT department, who can now inflict ribbon toolbars on your system without you even having to reboot.
The application monitors your daily activity for increased efficiency, automatically timesheeting your use of Facebook or Twitter at work, for your comfort and convenience when demonstrating their business necessity and utility to your company’s social media strategy to your boss. Firefox no longer works, but that’s a small price to pay for this sort of well-maintained elegance.
The final Office 365 release will include a marketplace where Microsoft partners will be able to sell applications for your Windows Phone or BlackBerry. (Android and iPhone are not supported, and will in fact explode on contact.)
The ribbon toolbar will not be present in the next version of Office 365, whose interface will be based on the recently-released hit game Portal 2. “Windows 7 was my idea,” says user interaction consultant GlaDOS.
http://rocknerd.co.uk
Most businesses have one or two custom functions or code. Pretty useless for the enterprise.
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Screams the slack-jawed yokel with the rented backhoe, complete with fiber optic cable hunter package.
I see you're trying to make a blockbuster movie. Would you like help?
I8-D
Fact of the matter is that VERY few people are fired for choosing a Microsoft product that does not live up to the sales pitch. Many contractors or government bureaucrats will choose and sell to their superiors Office 365 as a "cloud" offering even though really isn't (Of course try to pin down what "cloud" means....that is a problem unto itself).
On the other hand if said contractor chose Google Apps and the user base revolts or it fails they could very well get canned.
Bottom line, for most professionals who are just there to satisfy the boss's urge for cloud computing it's a safe bet no matter how bad it's delivered. Why? Because they can shrug and say "It's Microsoft, not my fault!"
Livin it up at the Hotel California.
Except for ending slavery, the Nazis, communism, & securing American independence, war has never solved anything.
Can I compose email offline the way I can with Outlook in cached mode? Say if I'm waiting between flights and can't get a WIFI signal, or if I'm stranded because Verizon blocked my tether ability (true story)? I'm not trolling, what happens when that goes down? Does this mean that you can DoS a business's SOHO router / firewall to shut them down for the day because they won't be able to run WORD, Outlook, ERP, etc...?
Will the Office 365 cloud suite have the "leap year" bug where everything deactivates on leap years?
"Everyone knows that vi vi vi is the number of the beast" -- Richard Stallman