What to expect from Microsoft Office 365

Although today Microsoft is not necessarily known as a founder in any area, no one can accuse them of not being aware of new computer trends and technologies. Its new cloud-based collaboration tool, Microsoft Office 365, appears to be a well-built rival to Google Apps.

Microsoft’s Business Productivity Online Standards Suite has been on the market for some time, and the new generation represents a full commitment to the benefits of cloud computing in Office 365. Software as a Service is now in beta and sees Microsoft joining the versions of their products for communication and collaboration in one integrated test, ‘without the need for updates’.

Office 365 will be released later this year (in 2011) and is set to contain:

• Microsoft Office Professional Plus for normal desktop applications
• Sharepoint Online for collaborative tasks
• Exchange Online for email
• Lync Online for integrated communications

Later, an adaptation of Office 365 that includes Microsoft Dynamics CRM will also be released.

Microsoft has not outlined a full summary of the functions and features that will be available through Office 365. However, IT and technology industry analysts say the offering is showing great potential.

Michael Osterman, president of Osterman Research, said, “Conceptually, Office 365 is a great idea. From a functional perspective, the integration of the online Office suite with hosted Exchange, SharePoint and Lync servers will be very useful.”

Osterman noted that having a consistent desktop experience for users across fixed machines and cloud computing will be a big help, especially with the mobile workforce revolution in full swing. This reduces training time for transitions to cloud-based operations and ultimately improves efficiency.

One of the key changes for companies already using Sharepoint will not be the move to the cloud itself, but the simultaneous upgrade from Sharepoint 2007 to Sharepoint 2010, says Kathleen Reidy, a senior analyst with the 451 group.

Reidy recently quoted that “SharePoint in Office 365 should be fairly feature-rich… There will be collaboration, content management, portal and search capabilities, for example, so that a small organization can set up an intranet, publish content and enable the sharing of archives and collaboration around this shared repository.

Microsoft itself sees one of the most important benefits of Office 365 as its scalability and applicability to almost all corporations and businesses. For example, for the first time, small businesses and non-profit organizations can have access to enterprise-scale software. Government organizations can use Office 365 to improve profitability, minimize training time, and reduce IT workload.

There will be 3 different versions of Office 265 available initially: Small Business, Enterprise, and Education. Each of these will have access to the 4 services mentioned above, with the standard suite of Microsoft Office, SharePoint, Lync and MS Exchange all included in the product.

Most impressive to some is that Office 365 can be up and running within a small organization in just a quarter of an hour.

Another valuable benefit of the platform will be access to technical support and troubleshooting, which can be hard to come by with the free Google Apps product. However, the pricing strategy is considered aggressive: low-end packages are considered to be efficiently accessible for small and medium-sized businesses.

Reidy went on to say that, “Particularly for smaller organizations that would not normally have the resources to buy, install, run, and maintain SharePoint, this is a very cost-effective option that will give them quite a bit of functionality from a basic file sharing standpoint, content management point of view.

If you think your business or organization could benefit from the flexibility of cloud computing, Office 365 will certainly be a good fit for you. The platform does not require the need for additional infrastructure, a learning curve for the new system or renewed security measures.