Four Great Reasons to Cast Your Vote for Microsoft Office 365

re: Four Great Reasons to Cast Your Vote for Microsoft Office 365

Ian Ray — Sat, 10 Nov 2012 00:13:35 GMT

In the recent past, the speed at which IT departments could roll out new software has been slow. IT has had to "socialize" a product before rolling it out and spend meeting after meeting "implementing" the project, finally pushing the package out through some hyper-galactic silent install, spending weeks on post-rollout training, and burning through hundreds of thousands to millions of dollars in the process while not always(/usually) being able to say these efforts were successful at increasing worker efficiency/productivity.

Currently, rolling out products can be rapid due to the emergence of managed SaaS products. Tight integration and security with things like Google's 2FA takes most of the administrative and maintenance overhead off of the table. Users are already socialized on the SaaS products because these are the types of products or (in the case of Gmail) the exact products that they use in their personal lives.

To try to understand this Microsoft argument: therefore, because Google and its partners take away the overhead associated with change management between various legacy software solutions, some anonymous CIO can't say that they "get it" and it just isn't ready for the "enterprise".

I know why these people don't "get it," their entire careers are based on skillsets that cloud-first SaaS is making obsolete. We have come full circle from the days when the mainframe ruled and powerful sysadmins created the exact platform for developers to develop on back to those days. The exception is this time the sysadmins aren't people on the company payroll, this is now a service-based operating expense. I have seen first hand non-technical employees rolling out cloud products to other divisions themselves without having to write a detailed proposal or obtain $85,000 in licenses.

The thing that gets me is on some fronts Microsoft is really embracing this modern technology (Azure, InTune, etc), and on other fronts (Office 365, Windows 8) Microsoft is not. Office 365 is one of the products where Microsoft is trying so hard to create a "hybrid" approach that they are losing sight of where the product will be five years from now.

re: Four Great Reasons to Cast Your Vote for Microsoft Office 365

Phil Wheat — Fri, 09 Nov 2012 02:00:01 GMT

OK, as a former Microsoft person, this is really annoying. You follow me on Twitter and spout nonsense - you push things as if they were fact but they're not. Delete this account - you're doing more harm than good.

re: Four Great Reasons to Cast Your Vote for Microsoft Office 365

Derik for the Cloud — Wed, 07 Nov 2012 15:55:35 GMT

Experience? You want to talk about experience; Google was born on the web, born in the Cloud. Microsoft? It's new to the Cloud and is trying to retrofit its on-premise solutions to the Cloud. Don't believe me? Ask Angela Livermore, from Microsoft, who stated at Tech Ed "Our goal at Microsoft is, if I have the capability in the product, I want to make that capability, or feature, available in the Cloud; It's just a matter of when" She then went on to state that the Office 365 products were not feature complete versus the on-premise solutions. She states "Exchange is about 90-95% complete, SharePoint is about 75-80% and Lync is about 60-70% complete, feature-to-feature".

Further, Microsoft went on to state that the Office 365 product are the same code base as the on-premise solutions; "it is just the 2010 version of those products, hosted in Microsoft data centers". Then they stated that that architecture was not built for highly scalable Cloud configurations.

How is that experience? As for killing products; have you read your own news release about how you are killing chat and "forcing" users to adopt Skype?

Strategy and vision? Have you paid attention to your own company? Windows 8? Are you serious? This is a totally consumer driven product that Microsoft "hope enterprises adopt"; Steve Ballmer said it himself "consumerization of IT is driving Enterprise behavior". Also, this is a complete change in the desktop user experience; it's like Microsoft is saying "yeah, we don't care what users think, or what they want, this is what we are going to do and they will get over it." Not listening to the customers, that is the Microsoft way!

How about the fact that Google provide an entire platform for customization and application integration and integration with existing back-office systems. Office 365? Nope...notta, nothing. Again, at Tech Ed, Microsoft got on stage and said Office 365 is "not customizable, it is a service, not a product. It is what it is" further stating that customers "should seriously read the Service Description document and understand the limitations". WOW! Talk about limiting your customer base!

When choosing a Cloud platform, make sure you, the customer, do your fact checking and understand which platform was born in the Cloud, and which one is pretending to be the cloud.