Office 365: The Safe Path to Taking Your Business to the Cloud?
There was once an axiom in the business world that no one was ever fired for buying IBM. In more recent times, the same could be said of Microsoft. And it's not hard to see why; innovative and exciting new technology solutions might look appealing, but they're risky. Microsoft, on the other hand, represents stability and strength. Looks like you no longer need to choose.
Last week, Microsoft finally launched Office 365, Redmond's foray into a cloud-based Office suite, and the company's direct assault on the space previously dominated by Google Apps and, to a lesser extent, Zoho.
Office 365 delivers an impressively complete suite of apps and services for businesses of all sizes. Indeed, if you already use Microsoft Office, it's hard to see what's missing here. If you haven't yet committed to a solution for your company, Office 365 is a cost effective way to get the full power of the suite for a fraction of the traditional cost. For the back end, Office 365 gives you access to hosted versions of SharePoint and Exchange, along with the full suite of Office Web Apps like Word, Excel, PowerPoint, and OneNote.
Setup is fairly painless -- I was able to get going in just a few minutes with little-to-no technical details required. You don't even have to bring an existing domain to the party, as Office offers one for you if you need it.
For e-mail, you get a revised version of Microsoft's long-established Outlook Web Access, which delivers most of the key features found in the desktop version of the program. The other apps are similarly well equipped; you won't find every single feature from the desktop versions of Word, Excel, PowerPoint, and OneNote, for example, but everything you'd routinely need is present, and it's presented just like the desktop apps, complete with the ribbon interface.
Microsoft offers a wide range of price points that (as is usual with Microsoft's wealth of choices) borders on confusing. For small business, you can sign up for $6 per user per month, while enterprise users have choices that range from $10 to $27 per user per month.
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