Office 365 aka Business Productivity online Suite is an online business tool that lets you use the office package, sharepoint and lync all for a very low monthly fee. currently the Fee is around R50 - R180 per user.
I installed the free 30 day trial to understand if this could take over the conventional way of managing Desktop users on and off site.
Above is basically the snapshot of an Office 365 installation. While office 365 was installing , I was also setting up Lync 2010.
The entire installation took less than 5min.
Signing into Office 365 for the first time
This is the frist look at Office 365. The interface looks sleek and managable.
After Logging onto Lync 4 times, I still did not manage to sign in successfully
One of the nice features of Office 365 is the collaboration that it provides in the form of sharepoint on the web. The free trial version also creates a internet sharepoint site, where colleagues can create and share documents anywhere they may be.
Above is an example of the word 2010 version that Office 365 provides. It’s nice and clean, however does not have all the Word functions and features we have known to use with the office packages. Albeit spell check works well.
I have cascaded the Office 365 Word and Desktop Office 2010 to show you the differences of the features on their respective menu bars.
Office 365 is purely dependent on a internet line to provide value to the end user. Without an internet line, there is bascially not much that can be used from this tool.
According to reports on the internet, the sharepoint Workspace on Office 365 can be used offline and then sync’d once it’s online again. I have yet to explore that and will review that in a future blog.
Verdict: In my opinion, the cost of using Office 365 or any other online business tool, be it Zozo, Google docs or Microsoft Office 365, a good and reliable internet line is the key component for this solution to work properly.
The privacy and confidentiality of you infomation on the cloud is another issue when it comes to putting everything in online storage.
Next blog: Online Secutiry and who or what is gaurding your data in the cloud.
Tags: Office 365, Online business Tools
