Microsoft Office 365: Oh, Happy Half-Birthday to You
Posted by Ken Klika on Wed, Jan 25, 2012 @ 01:46 PM
June 28, 2011 marked the official release of Microsoft Office 365, and as its name suggests, the Office 365 package seeks to create a complete Microsoft eco-system for users.
We now find ourselves six months into the product lifecycle of Office 365. Like any new product entering the market, it too had its original expectations developed by the user community. And, the reality is, sometimes product launches meet those expectations, and sometimes they don’t.
In this case, Office 365 met – and some may even say, exceeded – these expectations.
As I reflect on the last six months and my growing familiarity with the offering, key areas of interest that I believe are worth noting are:
- Ease of use has been exceptional. Not only is Office 365 allowing organizations to reduce their focus on IT Issues (hosting providers take on concerns surrounding hardware costs, support, software upgrades, backups, etc.), but the flexibility of being able to access applications from any device (laptop, desktop, smartphone) from any location (office, home, on the road) has improved user adoption.
- The overall reliability of the system has been very good for a new launch. As an IT professional, I’ve come to expect bumps in the road when it comes to product launches. Stability problems. Functionality that was supposed to work. I could go on. With Office 365, I was pleasantly surprised by Microsoft’s ability to deliver on what they promised. To date, we’ve encountered no significant outages and once initial implementation is complete, the application has been extremely reliable.
- Tight integration exists among core products. Thus far, I’ve been extremely impressed with the tight integration among the core products. I seem to be uncovering new things all the time. For example, Microsoft SharePoint’s functionality in the overall offering really drives uninhibited collaboration. The application’s ability to setup workflows, its integration with Outlook, synchronization of contact lists, creation of custom InfoPath forms, and data extraction to Excel combine to provide a very powerful cloud-based service.
While Office 365 doesn’t require a lot of TLC, one lesson learned thus far is regarding federated services which I previously blogged about. Yes, Office 365 federated services work like they’re supposed to, but I’ve found that they are optimal for organizations with 100+ users.
All-in-all, I now view Office 365 as a sort of technology ‘Advent calendar’ – I uncover a new piece of ‘candy’ every time I use it and this is very exciting! To date, we have transitioned nearly 30 organizations to Office 365, and all have gone exceedingly well.
If you’ve been thinking about cloud computing, and wondering if Office 365 is the real deal – it is. I can confidently say that Microsoft Office 365 delivers on what we envisioned it to be. If you want to learn more, contact me – I’d be happy to show you around and set you up with a free trial of Microsoft Office 365.
Now, does anyone know where you can find a half birthday candle…
