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A first look at Office 365

Nov 26, 2010 11:14 pm by damaster | 2 comments

More than a month ago, Microsoft announced the new Office 365 – the cloud-based version of its Office, Exchange, SharePoint and Lync solutions, which is intended to replace the current BPOS, Office Live Small Business, and Live@EDU offerings. While most of us are still on the beta waiting list, Paul Thurrott from Winupersite.com had the chance to play around with the new service:

Users can login to the Office 365 Dashboard, as shown above, and access the web-based Outlook Web App, as well as Office Web Apps hosted on SharePoint (called Team Sites). Officer 365 also offers users to download to Lync 2010 client, Office Professional Plus 2010 (if using the correct license), and the Office 365 Connector which configures system components to work with Office 365. Here’s an excerpt from Paul Thurrott’s review:

The beauty of Office 365, of course, is that it aims to work equally well for the smallest of businesses–literally, a business of one–and the biggest enterprises, and everything in between. It’s early days yet, and I’ve got months of testing ahead of me, but my initial impressions are all very positive. I was able to get an admittedly small domain up and running on Office 365 very easily. I suspect those in the trenches will make even shorter work of it.

You can check out Paul Thurrott’s full review at Winsupersite.com. From the sounds of it, it’s definitely a right direction for Microsoft in moving their Office solutions to the cloud. Let’s hope it turns out well!

This entry was posted in News and tagged Office 365, Office Web Apps, Outlook Web App. Bookmark the permalink.

Mikeshen11
Worth a try without even look at what that Bpos is
JohnCz
I’ve been evaluating Office 365 Beta and have to say it has great potential. I definitely see value in the enterprise class features. And for small businesses, Access Services is extremely useful. I’m looking forward to see how the Beta progresses over the next 4 months or so.
That said, the Windows Live team didn’t make it easy because Live SkyDrive, Live Groups and Office Web Apps are very powerful in themselves. For my primary business, I use Office Live Small Business and I find the Wave 4 updates to Windows Live to be sufficient for my needs there. When Office Live Small Business first came out, I used its SharePoint functionality but I find myself using mostly Live SkyDrive and Live Groups now. So I’m debating whether I need the added complexity of Office 365. However, for another business I’m involved with, Office 365 makes perfect sense.