Microsoft’s Office 365, More Companion Than Replacement For MS Office

This past August, Microsoft opened a new retail store in Boston to go along with its one other store in Massachusetts, and several holiday stores have popped up in local malls. Microsoft built a small presentation space into its Boston store with a giant 80-inch touch screen monitor and has been hosting small events open to the public. Yesterday, I attended a presentation on Office 365 geared towards small businesses. Then event piqued my interest because I’ve been looking at Office 365 and other services, mostly for hosting Microsoft Exchange for my company. I wasn’t disappointed with the amount of information given about Office 365, but it led me to think that Office 365 isn’t ready for prime time as a replacement for Microsoft Office.

My hope with Office 365 was to replace the need for Microsoft Office 2007/2010 to be installed locally and to use Microsoft Office apps from the cloud, similar to Google Apps. Why not move to Google Apps you ask? Because, like many other businesses, we’re heavily invested in being a Microsoft shop and rely on Microsoft SQL Server and Excel database connectivity features that aren’t available in Google Apps. But I’d like to get away from having Microsoft Office installed on my user’s machines so that we don’t have to update them and make it possible for users to work remotely without having to log in to their machine at work using Logmein.

Essentially, Office 365 is the “online companion to Office.” To use Office 365, you must already have some flavor of Office 2007 or 2010 installed on your computer. Yes, you read that correctly. Office has to be installed locally. So, what exactly is Office 365 then? If it doesn’t replace installed Office, what is it? Office 365 gives you Microsoft servers that you might already be hosting offsite, Exchange, SharePoint, and Lync, and it adds in cloud storage of your Office files with the capability for some “light” editing in a browser-based app for Word, Excel, OneNote, and PowerPoint. There’s no definition I could find online about what “light” editing means.

Most companies don’t have the in-house expertise to run Exchange locally, so they need to outsource it. The $4 per user per month plan for Hosted Email isn’t a bad deal. You get all of Exchange’s features available in Outlook, Outlook Web App, Active Directory synchronization, and 25 GB mailboxes with the ability to send attachments up to 25 MB. However, you must have your own copy of Outlook installed to get this plan. My company is a member of the Microsoft Partner Network, with access to internal use licenses, so this isn’t a problem.

The rest of the Office 365 give you additional capabilities as outlined above, but aren’t a replacement for Office 2007 or 2010. I’d be willing to pay above and beyond my company’s Partner Network Membership if it meant a totally cloud-based solution that didn’t involve local software installation. That’s not what Office 365 is and that’s why I am passing on it. For now. A Microsoft rep confirmed to me that a future version of Office 365 will be what I am looking for and I look forward to seeing if it will fit my company’s needs then.