Office 365 Not Ready for Prime Time

The price is right: $6 per user per month. And you get what you pay for. While email works, and you can use the online or a local Outlook, be careful. If you allow your machine to be set up automatically, it will wipe out all your inbox rules. And since there is no reasonable way manage inbox rules, you are really screwed if you rely on this traditionally powerful feature of Outlook.

But Outlook is the best part of this offering. Outlook Web Access (WOA) has evolved to become a reasonable option for those of us who need to connect with an Exchange Server along with our real life, and maybe a small business life on the side. Office 365 maintains and extends that strength.

I should point out, parenthetically here, that Outlook has the same issue with wiping out any carefully setup client if you should decide to use it to connect to a private Exchange Server. Apparently MS does not expect anyone to use Outlook for anything but a fresh connection to Exchange. Or to have their POP or IMAP accounts to be primary. Or to have multiple, frequently changing, Exchange Accounts. I guess they don't really know about small business as necessity in bridging corporate jobs.

But my real complaint about this offering is similar to my reasons for cancelling the similar Google offering last year. It's just not all there.

This is advertised as enabling a small business to offload the burden of administration." Yet a user is repeatedly presented with roadblocks saying "contact your support team" or "contact your administrator."

I've been trying to use this service on a Mac, since I recommended it as an economical offering by a solid vendor to a shop using both Macs and PCs. More than ever before, I'm seeing the difference in culture between Microsoft and Apple. I continually get dialogs (it happens on the PC as well) asking me about 32bit or 64bit. Silverlight runs me around in circles with confusing and conflicting "must install" "download" "can't install because a newer version is already installed" "restart in 32bit mode". These are not issues or terms that Mac users are accustomed to dealing with.

Today, I would characterize the difference in approach as "educate the users" vs. "educate the developers."

I still haven't been able to get Lync to work. Mac or PC. Troubleshooting still required for Silverlight on Mac and server temporarily unavailable on PC issues. Looking at the time investment to get Lync actually working for everyone on the staff vs the cost of GoToMeeting -- I'm not sure I'm inclined to switch. And that's before I find out how it really functions. GTM just works. At least through most firewalls.

An interesting thought occurred to me as I tried to solve problems in using the Sharepoint (Team Site) feature of Office 365. I see a very well developed infrastructure for delivering help to the user - FAQs, Community content, Help content (now merged with marketing content), etc. There has clearly been a very big investment in developing this infrastructure. But the infrastructure itself is difficult to deal with, and the corresponding investment is not being made in the content it delivers. Help files are out of sync with the product, "community" questions are slowly responded to by poorly trained support staff. System requirements are complex and time consuming to deal with. Microsoft needs to step up with the staff to support users -- for content and real-time.

I'm at least a little tweaked by the marketing vs reality on this service more than any Microsoft product I've experienced. For instance, the service is advertised as working on Firefox on the Mac. It's only when the Team Site functionality is broken and you need to troubleshoot that you find only some features work on Firefox on the Mac. And of course there is not anything close to parity in functionality with IE on the PC, even with all the ad-ins and helper apps.

The cloud offerings are going to take time to stabilize and be actually cost effective for small businesses. I'm beginning to think I should just find the most appealing and stable cloud components for email and collaboration and create my own smorgasbord. My email server, Dropbox, and GoToMeeting require nothing like the level of maintenance and support that Office 365 does.

whew! just had to blow off some steam. And clarify the decisions I need to make.