Office 365 had its official global launch, but it's been available in public beta since April—has anything changed?
There have been some enhancements since the beta release, including scalability improvements and some changes to the UI. "In the small business offering, there have been improvements in the way Web apps are profiled, things have popped up a bit more. These changes are based on feedback," said Eron Kelly, senior director of online services at Microsoft.
I took a preliminary look at the beta release back in April, but have since had the chance to take a deeper dive. I wanted to see if I noticed any changes, but I have to admit, I didn't note the changes in the user interface that Kelly mentioned. I did, however, notice some add-ons for Lync that make it an even more compelling unified communications platform for the SMB.
New features added since the beta include a translator for IM chatting with someone in a foreign language (it works very well) and a "trust" analysis tool that will search for keywords in messages and rate them as "positive" or "negative." For instance, any message worth the word "sucks" by default is measured as "negative language." I can see a business using this trust index as a way to keep tabs on the type of language employees are using with customers or within the business, or perhaps to ensure that sensitive information is not communicated outside of the company walls.
My second look still found hosted Exchange to be the strongest component of Office 365. I can't imagine any reasons, beyond perhaps the inability to depend on Web-based email, that a company already running Microsoft software, especially a smaller company, would not opt to move to cloud-based Exchange. The high-fidelity experience with a rich Outlook Web app client, as well as granular controls, are there, and the subscription cost, in the long run, can be cheaper than paying for a full-time Exchange system administrator or consultant to manage, update, and maintain an on-premise server.
Plus, with hosted Exchange you don't have to worry about backing up a local Information Store. Microsoft takes care of that for you. I remember tedious nights trying to salvage a hosed Exchange box and restoring the database from tape, only to find corruption in the backed-up database. Restoring Exchange from backup can sometimes be a nightmare, and having it in the cloud takes away that misery.
I think the best cases for hosted Exchange migration, for now, are smaller businesses that may be using a generic Webmail solution like Hotmail or Gmail and may want to move to a more polished and customizable email solution like Exchange. Or perhaps businesses with smaller Active Directory structures consisting of less than 200 users with on-premise Exchange, which could see a savings in money and administration time by moving to Exchange online.
Larger businesses with hundreds or thousands of users may have some pain points moving user mailboxes and Active Directory services over to hosted Exchange. AD and Exchange can have so many different settings and configurations from organization to organization that I can anticipate some of the larger businesses having issues because AD can be fickle, especially when dealing with multitudes of user accounts.
SharePoint 2010 Server online is central to Office 365. With it, users have document sharing and collaboration capabilities via Document Libraries and Team Sites. Users can also create their own workspaces complete with multimedia files, wikis, and blogs. SharePoint seems to still retain some of the quirks I discovered when testing the beta. Co-authoring was a bit unclear, as I could not set up co-authoring on a Word document. I could only get co-authoring to work in documents that were divided into sections—I'm not sure if that's by design, but if you can't co-author the same part of a document, that seems to lessen the collaborative capabilities.
I also had a problem with offline file synching—a feature, undoubtedly many SharePoint users would want. I received mysterious "unhandled exception" errors during the sync process.
Despite these issues, SharePoint does provide a way to deploy document collaboration in an organization. Those already masters at administering SharePoint server will find it easy to adopt to managing SharePoint online.
Microsoft is making quite a leap, but in the right direction as trends would indicate, by taking its usually locally installed wares and placing them in the cloud. If Office 365 can prove scalable, have minimum downtime and is virtually impenetrable to hackers, we may see much of the SMBs retiring their on-premise servers in the years to come.
For more, see PCMag's full, hands-on review of Office 365. and the slideshow above.
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