LAWTECH: The good and bad of Microsoft’s Office 365

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Microsoft recently announced the public release of Office 365, the cloud-based subscription version of its Office productivity suite.

This release seems more about changing the way you pay for software than offering better productivity or improved technology, however. Competitors such as Google have been successfully offering cloud-based software on a subscription basis.

Claiming more than three million businesses as customers, Google Docs offers office productivity solutions for about fifty dollars per year. Microsoft’s Office suite, however, is a desktop-installed perpetual license with a lot of customers passing on upgrades. Microsoft, no doubt looking to stop the bleeding and recapture that market, has released Office 365 as a means of transforming those customers into an annuity.

What’s in the (virtual) box?

Office 365 is a bundle of services that comes in a small business tier for less than 25 users, and a midsize/enterprise tier for organizations with 25 or more users.

The small business version is the least expensive “off the rack” offering with limited customization. The midsize/enterprise tier offers more customization and integration capabilities in four configurations, depending on what a particular organization needs. 
Both offerings include Exchange Online for hosting email services, SharePoint Online for document and content management, Outlook Online for individual email access and Office Web Apps for Word, Excel, OneNote and PowerPoint.

Office 365 also incorporates Lync as a backbone for instant messaging, web and conferencing.

First looks

“First looks” might be a bit of a misnomer. Office 365 is largely a repackaging of things that have been otherwise available from Microsoft under different labels. Overall, Office 365 replaces Microsoft Business Productivity Online Services (Exchange Online for email hosting and SharePoint online for document management).

The Microsoft Web Apps for Word, Excel, PowerPoint and OneNote have been available through Microsoft Live, and Outlook Web Access has been available for years.
The result is an amalgamation that feels disjointed and far from integrated. The user interface to access these disparate tools looks and feels like something that was cobbled together rather than something crafted to boost productivity. The navigation through the Office 365 landing page is clumsy and unintuitive.

Office 365 incorporates SharePoint Online as the backbone for document and content management. It seems clunky and unnecessarily complex when compared to the document sharing capabilities of Google Docs.

SharePoint is certainly more feature-rich, but unless you already know SharePoint or want to take the time to learn, it’s probably overkill.

It’s not all bad news – the user interfaces of the Office Web Apps for Word, Excel, PowerPoint and OneNote are superb and immediately familiar.

These apps are not replacements for their full-featured big brothers on the desktop, but are very capable for document review and basic editing. You can use your mobile device to access documents via Office 365 – again, a nice supplement to the desktop suite but hardly a replacement.

Exchange Online is also nicely done. With a modest amount of planning and effort you can set up and manage your own email and calendaring services. If you’re migrating from an existing mail server, you might want to hire out the initial setup, but once it is done, administration is a fairly simple matter of adding and deleting users and mail groups, and assigning privileges.

Pricing

Office 365 starts at $6 per month per user for the professional/small business version and tops out at $27 per month for the midsize/enterprise version (which includes the desktop tools integrated with the online services).

The Verdict

If this were the definitive salvo from Redmond for cloud-based solutions, Google could declare victory.

As it is, Microsoft has a long and storied tradition of striking out a few times before getting a base hit.

Some of its best commercial successes have come on the heels of painful embarrassments like Windows 2, Windows for Workgroups, Bob and Vista. It has the market and the resources to keep swinging at the cloud market. I suspect that however disappointing Office 365 might be that there will be a new version in due course that comes a bit closer to the mark.

Should you care? Definitely. Office 365 is more than a new software offering. Microsoft has mainstreamed its meat-and-potatoes product line from perpetual licensing to a subscription-based model. Look for other offerings from Microsoft – and other vendors – to follow suit.

Ron Phillips is a self-described attorney-computer nerd with more than 15 years of experience as a software architect and technology entrepreneur. He has helped to design and build enterprise systems for large and mid-size corporations, developed commercial software products and authored several books and articles concerning software development, applications and technology.