Cloud Office 365 or Not?

[MacB]

Does anyone use the new 365 yet and how do you find it?

I have a backburner project to bring a small business kicking and screaming forward and the original discussions, a long time ago, centred around server solutions. But the proliferation of devices, combined with very low tech end users, seems like it would seriously complicate synchronisation. I've been having a scan over the 365 subscription options and I'm struggling to see any reason to opt for a server over this.

Any feedback would be great or if you have any links to good, not too technical, discussions on the subject then I'd like a read please....thanks.....Al

 

[subaqua]

not got any experience of the "commercial " version run over the cloud but the Home 365 premium works particularly well at home. for the 3 devices we have it on

if Cap Gemini and Aston Martin are using it then i can't see there being too many issues

 

[Acyclo]

I tried Office 365 but I found it unable to edit Office 13 documents people had sent me. It also had trouble rendering pages from the Office 13 documents correctly. In the end I downloaded the Office 13 trial version to fill out the documents I was sent.

If you are sharing documents for a project I can personally recommend Google Drive (http://www.google.com/drive/about.html?authuser=0). As for viewing Office documents I use the free Office Viewer software (http://www.microsoft.com/en-us/download/details.aspx?id=4). I haven't had to edit an Office document recently, but I hear that Libre Office (https://www.libreoffice.org/) can make a stab at it, and the online conversion utilities (http://www.zamzar.com/ ; http://document.online-convert.com/convert-to-doc) also work well enough for some things

 

[MacB]

interesting and yes I've been having a nose at Google Drive as well, even read a couple of direct comparison reviews. The attractions of the 365 solution are all achievable via other means, many of which are free. But the 365 subscription rate isn't high(I know....yet) and it's the new Premium version which should be compatible/the same as Office 2013....or so the blurb and latest reviews tell me. To give an idea:-

small business up to 15 employees - a lot of contractors so numbers rise and fall
take 2-3 main licences giving full access from multiple devices at approx £10 a head per month
throw in a further 12 licences at the £3 a month mark to give access to calendars, e-mail, documents - there's a lot of large file sharing
we're talking a business with minimal internal IT knowledge and a good chance of devices getting trashed with above average frequency, so the cloud storage and recovery would be good
licences and access permissions can be altered at will and the numbers scaled up and down - I think the current upper limit is 25

My gut feel is that a server solution would be more work, certainly a much higher initial cost and would need more ongoing care and cost. My biggest concern would be loss of internet creating issues, maybe some sort of workaround to allow offline continuation? Or is it really more a problem of the past now?

 

[Acyclo]

To prevent a loss of ADSL causing a problem get a router with 3G failover. The Draytek ones are highly thought of.

 

[MacB]

To prevent a loss of ADSL causing a problem get a router with 3G failover. The Draytek ones are highly thought of.

oooh...now I like that idea...thank you

 

[Danny]

I was running a small business I would avoid the hassle of a server and go for Office 365 or Google apps. If your users are seriously low tech and don't need all the functionality of MS Office then I would seriously consider using Google apps

Sounds like you have already researched Office 365, but if you are interested Jack Schofield recently reviewed the various versions of MS Office in the Guardian - including Office 365. The review provides a good summary of the various options available.

 

[musa]

My uni has moved over to the 365 tbh more hassle really i cant use outlook.com tologin emails

 

[MacB]

My uni has moved over to the 365 tbh more hassle really i cant use outlook.com tologin emails

is there a handy translation tool with it?

 

[JoeyB]

We use and sell Office 365. It's great until they have service outages and take ages to acknowledge a fault!

 

[MacB]

Well I made the jump and so far it seems good though the seamless upgrade was anything but. I've also put the Office 2013 suite on all of the office machines, which you get as part of 365 Small Business Premium licence, the cloud stuff is really only for hooking up remotely and the guys in the field. If anyone is thinking of this then these were the pitfalls I fell into:-

DNS(Domain Name Server) - I had to learn about this as we didn't want a change to our e-mail addresses etc. When you create the 365 account MS assigns you an e-mail address and to change it to your own you need to make DNS changes at your hosting site. I managed this by a mixture of help files and youtube instructional videos - to start with I had to look up what DNS stood for!!!

Step 1 of the above is proving that you own the domain you want to direct via 365 and these changes can take up to 72 hours to propagate through. I did this on a Friday evening to allow the weekend to swallow the change time.

Steps 2-4 are straight forward.

Step 5 is where you set the changes live so to speak and that's the one that really caught me out. It involves a further verification process and therefore another 'up to 72 hours' for the changes to propagate. This buggered up our e-mails and at one point we were able to send out but returns were bouncing as if we didn't exist. So I then had to get jiggy with the in/out server settings to point one to the new setup and the other to the old. This took me about 4 hours in the evening as I had to watch more videos to learn how to do it. But I got it all working then came into work the next morning and the changes had fully propagated so I had to undo the workaround I'd put in place the previous evening.

If you don't need to migrate an existing e-mail then I would imagine it is pretty straight forward. Certainly it's doing for us what I hoped as in shared e-mail, calendars and files in the field on the cheaper/limited licences and access to the whole shebang from any machine for the full licences. Outlook 2013 is a bit of a shock as personal customisation is rather limited but it's not too bad. Whether the access anywhere is a good thing depends really on whether you want/need it. As we're getting everything up on to Skydrive no-one can now say the files in the office so it'll need to wait until tomorrow/Monday/whenever. Personally I like being able to come home and work from my home office or one of the laptops rather than needing to stay in the office. I also like that I don't have to lug around a laptop, mess about with drop boxes or carry a data stick to do this.

At the end of the day it's a tool and one that I hope they will continue to refine. IMO if you were thinking of buying Office 2013 then this is a bit of a no brainer as long as the subscription aspect doesn't bother you. This version of 365 gives you the full 2013 desktop suite as part of the package. From a family perspective it could work as well - one licence loaded on up to 5 machines, yes you only get one e-mail/skydrive account but most of us already have online e-mail accounts anyway.

I'd still like to hear hints, tips, tricks from more experienced users.....Al