Office 365 Ready for Duty -- Redmondmag.com

Barney's Blog

Office 365 Ready for Duty

With most Microsoft products, we spent months (and sometimes years) talking about them before they actually ship. Often when they arrive we stop the jibber jabber because they didn't live up to all the anticipation.

Now we'll have to see if Office 365 will live up to the hype -- this puppy is now officially available.

Redmond magazine writer Jeff Schwartz interviewed a bunch of Redmond Report readers beta testing the product, and the reports were pretty good. Features were abundant, and the price wasn't too shabby. The biggest problem: performance was dictated by network latency -- never a good thing.

Here are the key issues to contemplate: Does this make economic sense? Is the performance good enough to keep the IT person who buys it employed? And how reliable is the service and data protection?

But to get the real skinny, I'll turn it over to Ian, a regular Redmond Report contributor, who said this:

"I've just put my first customer on the cloud using Office 365. Their first comment was, why is it so slow? But for $6 per user per month (P1 plan) that's a bargain compared to BPOS.

But, back to UC. The Lync on Office 365 is dumbed down, just like Exchange, and you can't use Office Communicator (MOC) AND Lync on the same computer. Lync isn't compatible with OCS 2007 R2 and MOC isn't compatible with Lync Server 2010. Now that's a problem. Let's hope Office 365 Service Pack 1 has some answers. Microsoft bought Skype, but what they need is Vonage. Wonder if they have enough cash left over to buy Vonage?

I'm not sure the cloud will ever be as big as anyone hopes. Not a single customer wants to go slower. Ever. Go ask any computer user if slower is OK and see what they say. Opening a large PDF on the cloud can be agony."

Posted by Doug Barney on 06/29/2011 at 1:18 PM

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