By P. J. Connolly
Using the cloud to deliver applicationscertainlyisn’t a new idea, but it’s one that’s had to wait until
now for technology to catch up
with it. Microsoft’s Office 365 is the
company’s answer to the increasing demand for anywhere, anytime
access to applications and services.
The software provides both small
businesses and enterprises with
hosted instances of Microsoft’s
Office application lineup, while
relieving IT staff of much of the
day-to-day care and feeding of those
applications.
At first glance, the service, which
opened as a public beta in mid-April,
could be a blessing for organizations
that would like to take advantage of
the tight integration that Microsoft
offers in its desktop and server applications, without investing in the
hardware or staff necessary to deploy
such collaboration and productivity
tools as Lync and SharePoint.
Office 365 encompasses a well-thought-out collection of services
that combine flexibility and stability, while conforming to real-world
business needs for compliance and
security.
In its first incarnation, enterprise customers can provide their
users with email through Exchange
Online, advanced communication
services through Lync Online and
collaboration tools in the form of
REVIEW: Our first look at Microsoft’s cloud-based
office suite and services is definitely encouraging.
Office 365 beta
proves promising
the service. I’m a bit of a pack rat,
but at the rate I go, it would take me
at least a decade to fill up that much
storage space.
Office 365 gives an organization
a choice of presenting the service
through a subdomain of Microsoft’s onmicrosoft.com domain, or
through the organization’s own DNS
(Domain Name System). Depending
on how the organization handles
DNS, presenting Office 365 as a
subdomain of the organization’s
own domain can get tricky.
The DNS entries will be child’s
play for outfits that run their own
DNS servers. However, when I tried
to set up the Office 365 services to
present themselves through a subdomain of one of the e WEEK Labs
domains, I found that our provider
couldn’t easily accommodate the
service records required to deploy
Lync Online.
Straightforward management
The management functions of
Office 365 are relatively straight-
forward. The Web-based front end
Although hosted instances of
the Office server apps are already
available from third parties, the
Office 365 instances raise the bar
for what customers should expect.
For example, some Exchange deploy-
ments constrain users to a couple
of gigabytes of storage. Exchange
Online users get a 25GB mailbox
as a default, as well as the ability to
send messages up to 25MB in size.
That alone is enough to sell me on
Microsoft Office 365’s home page gives users access to Lync, Outlook and SharePoint,
and it provides a download link for Office Professional Plus.
