Office 365 Not Ready for Prime Time

If you have been considering moving to Microsoft's Cloud and you’re a devout customer of theirs, you might want to pause or at least look before leaping. Our recent experience with Microsoft’s new Office 365 beta online service (www.microsoft.com/office365) product was a tad daunting. The first order of business that threw us was the registration process. We assumed having an existing Live I.D. account would facilitate easy sign-up. However, it requires that you create a new unique Office 365 account, which makes sense if you’re new to Microsoft or from a competing SaaS vendor.  So don’t try logging in with your existing Hotmail account. It simply won’t work.

Next up, we attempted to migrate our existing Exchange server accounts and data from our premises to Office 365 cloud, which turned out to be a non-starter. Microsoft provides a nifty tool to perform this rather complex migration, but if you are on a non-dedicated IP address using say, Microsoft Small Business Server (SBS), then you’re out of luck. The Exchange migration tool will never find your server on the Web. The only way to fix this is get the SBS Server on a dedicated IP address. You can use Microsoft Exchange Remote Connection Analyzer tool http://bit.ly/mkykO4 , but we still couldn’t find the server due to the nature of dynamic Web hosting.

 One other quirky feature we found with 365 was the way it spawns multiple windows when navigating the product from the admin console. It appears as though the entire system was cobbled together with current and past products such as, Office Online and BPOS, respectively. We’re not sure how you feel about, but personally we find it annoying when an online service or application spawns multiple windows when navigating throughout the system. For instance, launching into Outlook spawns Exchange Online and when clicking on Web Sites, it launches their old Office Online web site editor application, which has now been migrated to Office Online.   

All in all, Office 365 offers a plethora of services including online video conferencing (Lync), messaging (e-mail and instant), calendaring and Web site hosting that offers tremendous value for a small to medium sized business. Ranging from $6 to $27 per seat/per month, it isn’t bad considering what you get in return. Just remember this product is in beta and is not intended for production use. We tried getting an answer from Microsoft regarding its launch date, but they couldn’t tell us. However, given the expiration date of the beta (November 29, 2011), we think it will RTM in the Fall of 2011.