Microsoft gets in a spin, announces Office 365 Microsoft has shoved its productivity suite of apps into a cloud-based service it has dubbed "Office 365" that is aimed at business customers. The company said that Office 365 would replace its clunkily-named Business Productivity Online Suite (BPOS). Office Live Small Business and Live@edu will also be ditched in a brand …
1. I first used a shared google doc about 5 years ago (between friends not work colleagues). MS will launch something next year? Bit behind the curve then.
2. Most businesses who actually make or do things (rather than just rent them out or license their use) work on a lot longer timescale than software companies would like. Re-inventing core products like this every year or so will not encourage participation from those who have accountants, and need to capitalise the spend. They would be worried that one day the service will dissappear like vapour. That's not so say they don't have a place, just don't bet the ranch on a cloud.
If there is one single application that has few, if any, real benefits from not being run locally, it's an office suite. If you want to write a letter, why should you need an active net connection, when it would be a faster and richer experience doing it on the local machine.
Storing documents in a cloud, yep, i can see that being a benefit, but the actual tool used to create it?
These days, browsers are getting more powerful, internet connections are becoming more robust, and the cloud applications provide a rich user experience.
The benefit of having the suite in the cloud are: easy to update, harder for the end-user to corrupt, easy to have everybody using the same version of the tool, better to prevent users installing their own add-ons to screw the application up, easier to collaborate, more reliable antivirus management, harder for documents to be corrupted by sharing, better mobility of users.
Only a few years ago, it was easy to defend local office applications - poor internet connections, especially on the move, slow interfaces, flaky user experience. But these days, the applications are much more robust with rich user experience, and internet connections are reliable in the majority of offices (not all I admit)
These days it is getting harder to justify running the suites on your local machine and become obvious that the cloud is the better way.
Must get my coat - the cloud is coming....
There is a good application here for mobile workers. Its effectively giving you access to your full corporate set up from home or where ever you land without having to licence those individual PCs. If you have users who use an office suite but not email, or who use a shared mailbox, it means you can save a couple of licences here if you can arrange it like a concurrent licence (something Microsoft has not offered in so long I can't even remember if they ever did)
It also saves you from having to install, maintain, patch and upgrade all those copies of Office. If the cost is more important to you than the user experiance then this will be very attractive. The more you put in the cloud the less tech staff you need to support each office on your estate.
As we are moving our business model away from staff based in offices we are looking more at this kind of application and don't want to "go Google". I'm sure there will be others for whom a MS cloud applicaton answers a lot of questions about how we move away from on premise based IT
There is a lot of appeal to this product for the business world. Especially at the price point given. Office 365 will compete with the likes of google apps, but with the added advantage that it has the label "Microsoft Office", which for all its short-comings, is VERY popular.
At $7 per user per month for a small business, this is very attractive to the Microsoft alternative of buying servers and desktop subscriptions, and much easier to manage than buying individual software packages and OEM licences etc.
The big move (as I see it) in office software is the move to cloud based services, as advocated by amazon, google and Microsoft etc. Even if people have not being moving wholesale to the cloud it is happening at a smaller scale with moves to hosted applications and mail services (e.g, salesforce, hosted exchange, sharepoint, jungledisk, backup, messagelabs etc).
With office now moving into the cloud, and with the abundance of 24 hour fast connectivity, working on the move, working from home, the move is almost inevitable.
Yes there are some disadvantages as mentioned in other posts, but these are outweighed by having a stable, managed environment for your applications. Loss of connection to the internet happens less and less these days. I am fairly sure that more work problems are caused by loss of local data, loss/corruption of files and software by click-happy users and viruses, general poor management of local data and complete lack of interaction between users. Much of this can be mitigated by moving to the cloud.
The cloud is not without its problems, but the alternative is not better for the average office users.
More of a question to me is whether people will go with Google or with Microsoft. Although google have a significant head start in terms of hosted apps, at my last try, it still feels like a beta application and having dealt with google APIs in the past, they are often unreliable and likely to change (or in fact disappear altogether!). Everybody knows Microsoft Office, for better or worse, and if you cannot deal in office documents you are not going to get far in the business world - because most office workers will send lists of things in Excel format or pictures and documents as DOCX format. Just because that is what they have always done since they were given a computer. Believe me I have tried to get people to stop sending emails using proprietary exchange formats, use PDFs rather than word to send documents - all to no avail. They all say that their own customers use Word/Excel so they cannot use anything else. Sad but true.
Me, I use OpenOffice and OpenSource stuff wherever I can. Mostly I prefer it. But the business world is not following. And I cannot blame them. It is just the way it is!
Therefore Office 365 should prevail. Its a good idea - rebadged or not - and its starting to come in at a reasonable price point.
Whats your problem with that? The only real alternative is google apps. And Google are no less of an evil empire than Microsoft these days ;)
The Register 
Biting the hand that feeds IT
Copyright. All rights reserved © 1998–2024
