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.

What runs through your mind, can it be coincidental that three users working on a Saturday,have their windows account locked for no apprent reason or is there another problem, like maybe the domain is down or even crashed. Shock, Horror, can this happen to me now, on a Saturday morning.

You quickly get up and tell your User that you will log onto the network, identify the problem and get back to him shortly.

You logon to the system and you breathe easily, cos the domain seems healthy. You then log onto the AD users and groups and check the specific users accounts. To your amazement, their acounts are fine and not locked or anything.

When a you get the message: “Security logs are full” upon loggiing onto the DC,  sparks fly and you realise that the users cannot log onto the domain because the  security logs are full and their logons are not audited.

So you check the security logs and you set the properties to “overwrite logs when needs”

This will delete the oldest security logs to make space for the new log events.

You ask the users to try log on again and then everything works fine.

Now you can go back to what you were doing at Saturday morning, SLEEPING.

Also remember to change the Hardware Acceleration setting to 100% , in order for the mouse to be more more seamless across the VM and your localmachine.

Steps to IT Maturity

This caption basically illustrates the major stages that a typical IT environment would follow in order to realize their strategic IT goals based on the organisational goals.

As the IT environment proceeds higher up in the basic stages, the more business centric their roles and value-add become. IT jobs become more specific in ensuring that Business needs and only business needs are fulfilled. Their roles evolve into Infomation workers rather than IT support staff. With such stages in maturity comes with it the threads that ensure up ward maturity. This could be for eg, the continous refinement of system policies and procedures. It could also include the enhancement of Staff skills and education. It includes on-going  barrier-breaking technology and the resouces used to handle this technology.

The fundamental objective to reaching IT Maturity is bascially in my view, to work towards seamless internetworking technologies that enable the business to accomplish their short to long-term goals. To ensure that the business continues in it’s operations normally, the IT environment must play an important role.