Microsoft® Office 365 Online
Microsoft® Office 365 Online : A First Look
[ www.pcpro.co.uk ]
At this price, and with these
management tools, Office 365 could make it hard to justify running your own
Exchange server
Review
Date: 21 Apr 2011
Reviewed By: Mary Branscombe
Price when reviewed: £4 per user per month for 1-25 users (£12 with Office Professional
Pro licence), POA for enterprise
PREVIEW: Purchasing and maintaining software for a
business, small or big, is a costly undertaking. It isn’t just the licensing
that affects your bottom line, but the man hours that go into keeping software
patched and up to date, installing it on new machines and maintaining all the servers you
need to provide email and online services.
Microsoft’s Office 365, the public beta of
which was unveiled this week, aims to make the job easier. It’s the successor to
the current Business Productivity Online Services, and shifts a raft of
traditionally office-based products and services from the server room to the
cloud.
Included are Microsoft Exchange with
Forefront Online Protection for anti-virus and spam, SharePoint, Lync Online and
the Office Web Apps with (optional) licences for the full Office Professional
Plus, plus a SharePoint-based public website.
It can be used in two ways: alone as an
online replacement for email, unified communication and file-sharing that
delivers the full Office feature set as it was designed to work; or federated
with your existing on-premise servers to give you the same level of control and
configuration with far less management and maintenance.
For an enterprise it promises convenience,
for a small business it’s far cheaper and simpler than buying and managing a server. But
how much of the on-premise server power do you get and is it ready for
businesses to rely on?
Features and tools
To end users, Office 365 means extra
features. By combining Exchange, Lync Online and SharePoint servers (something
not every business has the wherewithal, time or money to do) Office 365 unlocks
the full Office 2010 feature set.
Features such as getting a warning that
someone’s out of the office when typing an email address, and being able to see
the person who made a change to one of your documents is online so you can ask
them what they meant in an IM or video call, aren’t available with an Exchange
server alone. And there’s a whole raft of other features worth having.
These include being able to attach a link
to a shared file so you don’t end up with five sets of comments to read and
merge; to take shared files offline and automatically upload and merge changes
when you get back to the office; and turn email replies into a database
automatically.
Administrators will also benefit from
going down the Office 365 route. Setting up Exchange, Lync Online and SharePoint
servers can be a prohibitively expensive and complicated process, and requires
ongoing management.
Signing up and signing in for Office 365
is simple, and takes you straight to an online management console. This covers
the settings for the service, subscription management for Office 365 accounts
and Office client licences, which you can allocate individually or by AD role or
using specific policies.
It also displays service health, with
warnings for any scheduled maintenance and wizards for creating migration and
co-existence plans. All this makes moving to Office 365 a clear and manageable
process.
If you’ve used the web management tools
for Exchange Server, these are identical but with many of the management
features for Forefront, SharePoint and (to a lesser extent) Lync. You can use a
limited number of PowerShell management commands too.
The vast majority of server features you
need are presented in an easy-to-manage manner, from laying out SharePoint sites
to sophisticated options for auditing and ediscovery, and this includes the
ability to create a central metadata store to normalise key business and
technical terms in SharePoint libraries to improve index and search.
The tools for managing mobile
devices are particularly useful, allowing you to set policies such as forced
encryption, block devices that don’t accept policies, and remotely wipe lost
devices, including iPads.
Other tools allow you to redelegate a
vanity domain, so internal Office 365 resources look like they’re on your own
domain instead of ‘mydomain.onmicrosoft.com’, and to migrate your existing email
domain to Office 365.
You can use ADFS (Active Directory
federation services) for true single sign-on, which means the same password can
be used to sign into client PCs, Office 365, email, SharePoint and Lync.
This even works with SBS 2011 Essentials –
an excellent complement to Office 365 for small businesses, giving you Active
Directory and local backup. It’s also easy to give business partners access to
specific SharePoint sites; users can just email them a link.
What’s missing
There are a number of pieces missing,
however, at this early stage. Tools for partners to manage Office 365 for
customers are coming, for instance, but these aren’t in this beta. The Business
Data Catalog (for viewing data from line-of-business applications) isn’t there
because Microsoft is still working on how to guarantee data privacy.
The biggest hole is full integration with
voice. Lync gives you voice and video conversations through the desktop client,
but you can’t yet give out one number that routes to the desktop, mobile or
deskphone as you move around.
You don’t get Exchange’s voice mail
search, either, and there’s no mobile Lync client for any platform. Microsoft
doesn’t plan to provide voice telephone services itself. Instead it will partner
with existing voice providers who can integrate their services with Office 365,
and these won’t arrive for about a year.
Lync Online, meanwhile, has the fewest
management tools of all the services. Although you can control domain federation
to allow connections to Lync users at companies you partner with, using
blacklists or whitelists, you currently also need to add a Lync Online hosting
provider to on-premise Lync servers to make this work. We expect Microsoft to
push out a Lync update to correct this before the service comes out of beta.
More limiting is the lack of federation
with public IM services. Lync only lets you chat with Windows Live users, not
AOL and Yahoo users and certainly not Google users (there’s no XMPP support).
Conclusion
Assuming Office 365 has the same level of
reliability as BPOS, at this price it could be hard to make a case for
on-premise mail servers unless your business is regulated. The inclusion of Lync
Online and SharePoint are the icing on the cake.
Indeed, Office 365 looks set to become a
credible business cloud service, and one that will make sense for a lot of
businesses that can find better things to do with their IT time and budget than
running an Exchange server.
Author: Mary Branscombe
[ www.pcpro.co.uk ]
This is really a fantastic blog site, lots of stuff that I can get into. One thing I just want to say is that your Blogging site is so perfect!
ReplyDeleteSharePoint Migration | Recruiting Software