Office 365
By Mary Branscombe
Office 365 delivers Office services from the cloud: Mary Branscombe logs on and tunes in.
HardCopy Issue: 53 | Found In: Cloud Computing | Published: 14/09/2011 | Last Revision: 14/09/2011
Microsoft Office 365 gives you cloud services for email, spam filtering, document management and collaboration, intranet and public Web sites, unified messaging and online meetings, plus a range of ancillary services that ‘light up’ features in Office applications. And depending on the plan you choose, it gives you the latest Office desktop software as well. There’s a third-party marketplace for services you can use with Office 365, and Microsoft is promising its own Dynamics cloud CRM service will work with it. So what do you get and how mature is it?
Online servers
All Office 365 plans include the latest version of Exchange Online. This gives you the vast majority of the features in Exchange 2010 (excluding only the highest-end ‘legal hold’ features) and you can manage it the same way you would Exchange Server, using PowerShell, System Center or the Exchange Web console. You can have a mix of Exchange in-house and online for different users if you don’t want to migrate completely to the cloud and manage the users side by side. Or you can use the simplified Office 365 console, which has a friendly and accessible interface, and still get access to powerful Exchange features.
You can manage mobile devices from Exchange Online in the same way as from Exchange 2010 too, setting Active Sync Policies for what information can sync to a phone, enforcing strong passwords or encryption, and blocking or wiping devices remotely. There’s a self-service option to let users block or wipe missing phones themselves.
If you don’t give your users Outlook, or they need email access from elsewhere, Exchange Online has the same powerful Outlook Web Access as Exchange 2010. This supports the vast majority of Outlook features, including conversation view, reminders, rules and creating out-of-office messages.
The Office 365 services come with straightforward administration consoles.
Spam and anti-virus protection comes from Forefront Online Protection for Exchange (FOPE), and you can leave this to default protection or set up custom filters for both inbound and outbound email, whitelist trusted IP addresses, set up Sender Policy Framework credentials and run audits on messages. The FOPE interface isn’t part of the well-designed Office 365 interface and isn’t as well laid out, but it’s still clearer than the on-premise Forefront console.
A place for sharing
Office 365 gives you pretty much the full power of Exchange without you having to manage a server. By contrast, SharePoint Online doesn’t give you quite as many of the features of SharePoint Server 2010. The main omission is business intelligence, but you can still build an intranet for users, complete with a personal page for each employee, and an external-facing Web site for your customers, as well as using lists and libraries for document management and collaboration with social network-style tools such as ‘liking’ and tagging documents.
You can group sites into collections to simplify management, and manage users from the admin console, but you set most of the options on the Team Site itself. These give you the same powerful options as SharePoint Server such as adding Web parts which can make SharePoint sites extremely powerful without being complex to use. There’s a rich mix of templates, themes and styles that you can apply quickly, or you can use custom backgrounds and borders to get your own look.
SharePoint Online can act as a host for InfoPath forms but allows customers and partners to fill them out in a browser so they don’t need to have a copy of InfoPath installed. You can also use it to host Access database applications that you convert to SharePoint sites. PowerPoint Broadcast lets a PowerPoint 2010 user invite people to a presentation that visitors can view from their Web browser.
SharePoint Online also powers the Office Web Apps, which are Web versions of Word, Excel, PowerPoint and OneNote. These don’t have the full features of the desktop apps but they do show you documents with full fidelity, and you can share them with partners and customers. The Office Web Apps are also capable editing tools that allow real-time collaboration and stop users from overwriting each other’s work. Features like charts and Word Art that you can’t edit from Office Web Apps are still visible, and the formatting won’t change when you get the document back into a full Office application (unlike Google Docs).
Some of the Office 365 subscription plans include licences for Office Professional Plus 2010 which includes SharePoint Workspace (the replacement for Groove), allowing users to synchronise documents from SharePoint and work offline. Otherwise they can open the SharePoint library in Explorer and use the standard Windows ‘always available offline’ option. Users can synchronise SharePoint lists to Outlook, or arrange to be notified of changes in libraries, discussions and calendars.
Office 365 promises 99.9 per cent availability and shows any recent issues as well as planned downtime.
This is where the combination of Office and Office 365 is really powerful, enabling features that are in the Office applications but that only work with access to the corresponding Office server products, and bringing them within reach of smaller businesses that would find managing that many server tools a burden.
Keeping in touch
The other significant tool in Office 365 is the online version of the replacement for Office Communication Server, Lync Online. This also turns on various Office features such as showing who is available to chat and letting you start a text chat or a voice or video call from Office, from the Lync client for Windows or from Windows Phone (Microsoft is also promising Lync clients for other smartphone platforms).
The alternatives to Office 365
The obvious comparison for Office 365 is Google Apps, which is also a cloud email and application service with per-user pricing. It includes Gmail with Postini spam filtering, Calendar and Contacts, Google Docs, Chat, Groups and Sites. While Google Apps has some powerful features and compelling simplicity, it doesn’t have the sophistication of Office and Exchange, the video chat doesn’t have the same meeting tools as Lync Online, the document management features lag far behind SharePoint, and integrating it with on-premise servers is a complex and fragmented process.
Microsoft’s existing Business Productivity Online Services (BPOS) cloud service doesn’t compete because over the next year BPOS customers will be migrated onto Office 365, which means some changes and several definite improvements. Office 365 runs on more modern data centres than BPOS so it’s more robust. It’s also based on the 2010 versions of Exchange, SharePoint and Lync rather than the 2007 versions that run BPOS. Not only do these include new features like MailTips in Exchange, but they were designed to run on a cloud platform which Microsoft claims will make them more reliable. Certainly, SharePoint 2010 has a completely new architecture and can handle much larger libraries and lists.
Lync Online replaces Office Live Meeting in Office 365, but BPOS users can continue to use Live Meeting (but not the Office Communicator client) if they prefer not to install the new Lync Client. Office 2003 (and especially Outlook 2003) doesn’t work with Office 365, so you’ll have to upgrade to Office 2007 or 2010 (remember that some Office 365 plans include licences for Office) or to Office 2011 or Office 2008 for Mac, or use the Office Web Apps. You can’t use IE6 either (although Firefox, Chrome and Safari are all supported and you can use it from Windows XP). The Live Sign-in assistant from BPOS isn’t available for Office 365, but you can implement single sign-on by integrating with ADFS 2.0.
Hosted Exchange Online and SharePoint Online are also based on the older versions of Exchange and SharePoint, but they are separate products with different Web consoles instead of the (mostly) unified Office 365 interface, and they don’t include LiveMeeting or Lync Online.
In addition, Lync Online lets you schedule meetings with up to 250 people using audio, video or Web conferencing. Lync Online federates with Windows Live Messenger and AOL by default and you can set up federation with Lync servers run by partners (they will need to whitelist you if they’re not running open federation). You can block individual users from chatting outside the company, and control who can transfer files and who can make video or audio calls.
If you want external users such as partners to be able to phone in to a meeting, even if they don’t use Lync, you can buy an audio conference option for Lync Online from BT. And while Lync Online doesn’t have full enterprise voice features, so you can’t use it to provide full unified communications, you can connect to an in-house PBX so that users can dial phone calls and listen to voice mail in Outlook.
Office with cloud power
Office 365 promises 99.9 per cent uptime: the same as Google Apps but with a much more generous financial SLA that credits 25, 50 or 100 per cent of the monthly charges if availability falls below 99.9, 99 or 95 per cent. You also get true 24/7 phone support for all issues, or you can request support right from the admin console.
The number of plans might look confusing but they’re actually easy to understand. The P1 plan is for small businesses of up to 50 users and it includes Exchange, SharePoint and Lync Online with a public-facing Web site and Office Web Apps. The four enterprise plans (E1 to E4) all include Exchange and SharePoint Online with each plan adding more features: Office Web Apps, rights to the Office suite and on-premise IRM and voice integration. The K2 kiosk worker plan is for users who don’t always have a PC of their own but share a computer to get Web email, SharePoint intranet and Office Web Apps. The result is that you can pick what you need and just pay for that, which is the other big benefit of cloud computing.