You are going to see a tsunami of articles about Microsoft Office 365. Here’s my 2 penn’orth.
Ever since I became an unashamed Mac fanboi, I’ve not used any Microsoft Office productivity products. I barely use Apple’s Keynote (aka PowerPoint) and do all my document handling on line with Google Docs or a content management system. I don’t really need those applications any longer. And I predict over time you won’t either.
However, I’ve long felt that Google has been dragging its feet in developing GoogleApps. Upgrades to email are reasonably steady but not much has changed in Docs the last year or two and the spreadsheet is really only usable for simple applications. I could have gone to Zoho for some solutions but despite all my moans about the way Google plays fast and loose with our privacy, I still prefer to stay with it.
Earlier today, Microsoft launched Office 365 and so I gave it a go. At first I got horribly confused, assuming I’d need desktop applications to get very far with it. That got me some pretty choice comments like this one:
@dahowlett you didnt see the GIANT word home at the top? I guess there is a reason why you’re using a Mac…
Turns out I was wrong, well sort of, but the user interface is so confusing – to me – that I could not initially find the web apps. When I finally figured it out I was disappointed:
I really want to like Office 365. I really want a system that beats Google Apps and upstages the coolness of the not as functionally rich Apple offerings. Microsoft has it in its power to do that. Unfortunately, Microsoft has dropped the ball big time on this because for me, it does neither.
Mary Jo Foley, who knows more about Microsoft than any human being in my network surprised me when she said that:
Office 365 is not Office in the cloud, even though it does include Office Web Apps, the Webified versions of Word, Excel, PowerPoint and OneNote. Office 365 is a Microsoft-hosted suite of Exchange Online, SharePoint Online and Lync Online — plus an optional subscription-based version of Office 2010 Professional Plus that runs locally on PCs. The Microsoft-hosted versions of these cloud apps offer subsets of their on-premises server counterparts (Exchange, SharePoint and Lync servers), in terms of features and functionality.
Oh – well that’s clear then. Especially as earlier she had said:
June 28 is the launch of Microsoft’s Office 365, its Google Apps competitor and successor to Microsoft’s own Business Productivity Online Suite (BPOS) hosted app suite…
It’s not a 100 percent cloud-based sales pitch, but many users I talk to prefer the hybrid approach to no software at all.
Hang on – Google Apps IS cloud based so how does a sort of cloud based suite compete? By sort of being cloud based it seems. Anyway – I still think it’s a dud. Look how it muffed my GMail import. (see image above) But then others who look at this topic from a more enterprisey perspective think Microsoft is onto something. They may yet prove to be correct but until Microsoft provides something that is compelling to users, all the infrastructure arguments in the world wont get them to use the applications.
