Microsoft 0ffice 365 Beta Reviews vs Google Apps

Microsoft splashed in online collaboration, The SharePoint service might not have set the world. But it was a dependable package. Microsoft Office 365 sports four cloud-hosted components: Exchange, SharePoint, Lync, and Office Web Apps,which you can use to get access the other three from a browser.

The accession of Dynamics Customer Relationship Management is planned. Some editions include a subscription to Microsoft Office Professional Plus: a version of Microsoft’s classic Office desktop clients, but whether it is included or not the majority of users will need Office installed locally.

Since the launch of  Windows Phone 7, Microsoft has been more focusing than ever on smart phones, and its dedicated interest in this market has led to some useful Smartphone integration. The 2010 versions of Microsoft Exchange and Lync are also included, offering good features for small businesses.

No other company keeps things simple as Microsoft. It has been come up with a
wide range of plans, summoned into educational, small business, and enterprise families. There is yet another kiosk plan for users without a dedicated computer.

Prices range from $4.00/£2.60 for a kiosk user with Exchange and SharePoint,to $24.00/£15.75 for an enterprise user including a desktop Office license and Lync Plus for voice communications, though this last must be implemented on-premise.

The Microsoft Office 365 is Exchange and SharePoint, of the deal being that you
get these in a standard configuration on a multi-tenant basis. It makes sense for
both large and small organizations that want to stay with Microsoft’s platform,like the idea of retiring their Exchange and SharePoint servers in favor of a hosted solution, and can accept that their data is nestled alongside that of other multi-tenant customers. Small businesses may even manage without a server at all.

Tying it all together:

Office 365 is aimed at small businesses that might not have dedicated IT staff, so
the ease with which its advanced features can be set up and configured is highly
commendable.

There are short video tutorials that helped us set up Office 365 much faster than we ever managed with SharePoint. When signing up for the service, we were given an ‘.onmicrosoft.com‘. Importing an existing domain name is pretty simple,and worth doing if you want to integrate Office 365 with your existing company site and e-mail.

If user doesn’t have already his own website, this Office 365 comes with a simple site builder. We were able to make a reasonable looking site in a few minutes using the included templates, stock photos and clipart. The websites user makes with this won’t win any design awards, but they look good enough and, most importantly, are easy to create.

The Microsoft Exchange 2010 service is the most perplexed of the services to set up, and probably the most important to get right, but it means you can send and receive e-mails, and share calendars and contacts. These can be accessed through a desktop email program, via a Smartphone or through Outlook Web Access – a pared-down web version of Outlook.

Outlook Web Access 2010 includes some handy different updates, like a faster, more responsive interface and improved support for browsers other than Internet Explorer.Ease of use We had Office 2010 software installed on our test machines, and we were able to configure them to interact with 365 by clicking the ‘Set up’ button in the ‘Downloads’ section.

This downloaded and installed a number of updates that let us use our desktop applications with 365 – saving documents straight from Word to the online SharePoint server. If take one example, As you might expect from Microsoft, we had to install several updates, with some updated programs then requiring other programs to be updated, and so on.

It wasn’t the smartest operations, but it was a good time-saver when used with the multiple personal computers.It does mean that users need to have Microsoft Office 2007 or 2010 installed; if they don’t have, they will lost some of the most useful functions. It’s clear that Microsoft Office 365 has been optimized to work with devices running Windows, Microsoft Office and Windows Phone 7. If your business uses OS X, Google Docs or Android smart phones, Google Apps offers more choice.

Microsoft Office 365 has had through lengthy beta testing, and with Microsoft’s
experience in developing the office software, the resulting service strikes a good balance between power, features and simplicity. It offers much the same functionality as Google Apps, with the same 99.9 per cent uptime guarantee, and is just a little more expensive.

Microsoft Office 365 is more efficient with its services integrating with much better than Google’s various products. If you have small business already uses Microsoft Office products then this is an excellent accompaniment, though if you don’t want to be tied to Microsoft products, Google Apps offers far more flexibility.

   GO4    Microsoft