The installation of Office 365 is significantly more complicated than installing Google Apps, or for that matter installing Microsoft Office.  The product is a combination of an online account with its various settings and permission requirements and then the installation of Microsoft Lync and the an installation of an Office communicator program and the setup of Outlook.  The instructions provided say to click here and download this, but they leave out about a dozen other steps and numerous questions and log-ons and reboots required.

The key benefit of Office 365 is that it is a full, hosted Microsoft Exchange Server offering priced at $6 per user per month.  For many business with fewer than 10 or even 25 employees, this puts having full Exchange at a very reasonable monthly price.  Compared to Pop3 mail (which is what is included in most webhosting packages), Exchange is a client/server program.  Your email, calendar and task list data resides on the server and various devices such as PC’s, web apps or your cell phone access the data.  The key benefit of this is all devices view the same data, so there isn’t any “out-of-synch” data issues.   Also, because your entire company would have all of its data on the server you can easily share and view calendar information, share contacts, etc. 

Office 365 (P1) has some limitations compared to other hosted Exchange plans offered by other companies.  For instance Office 365 (P1) – which is the Small Business Offering, does not include an Outlook license.  You can either use webmail only or purchase Outlook separately or as part of Microsoft Office.  Most of the other hosted Exchange packages on the market include an Outlook license and software download.

The beta version of Office 365 we are participating in is (P1), the offering for Professionals and Small Businesses.  Like all things Microsoft, there are numerous flavors available, most of them aimed at the Enterprise market.  We’ll discuss more about the flavors and versions in our next post.

We signed up for the beta of Microsoft Office 365 and Google Cloud Connect.  Microsoft, because of demand after the launch of their public beta, is backlogged and a week and a half later we still don’t have the information from Microsoft to begin using the service.

Signing up for Google Documents and Cloud Connect was simple and painless.  Google Documents is integrated into every Google/gMail account.  If you don’t have a Google account you can sign up for free.  Google Documents provides 7.5 GB of free online storage of files.  Interestingly, though, the storage limit does not include documents, spreadsheets, etc., that are created in Google Documents.  As on online, free offering it is clearly not as robust as the Microsoft Office Suite.  But if you just need a basic word processor or spreadsheet functionality, it works. 

We signed in with our gmail account and immediately had access to be able to store and share documents, spreadsheets, etc, stored on Google servers.  We then downloaded Google Cloud Connect which is an add-in to Microsoft Office that makes posting files to the cloud as simple as clicking a button in the toolbar of MS Word or Excel. 

Accessing the files is equally easy.  Simply sign-in with your Google account and there is a drop-down for documents.  You also have the ability from inside Google Documents to upload entire folders to the cloud.

The key benefit of Google Cloud Connect is in sharing and collaboration.  You create a document in MS Word, click the “Sync” button in the Cloud Connect toolbar and your document is stored in the cloud.  You can either log onto the Google website or simply click the link provided in the Cloud Connect toolbar to view the document in the cloud.  There is a share button and you can select or enter email addresses to share the document with, providing them with either view only or view and edit permissions.  The shared document shows up as an email to them and also is immediately in their Google Documents screen.  All changes and revisions are automatically tracked and synchronized.

While incredibly simple, there are some challenges, particularly in fonts/layout and editing.  Google Docs stores the Word document as a Microsoft Word file (.docx file) but it displays it on the screen as a Google Docs file.  As a result, the onscreen view converts the fonts to one of the 19 fonts that comprise Google Documents.  On one of our documents, it also changed the custom margins to standard Google Docs margins.  As a result, our 3 page document displayed as 5 pages and special fonts were converted to Arial.  Furthermore, because this is an onscreen display of a MS Word Document, you cannot edit it like you would a document created in Google Documents.  To edit the uploaded MS Word document you click a button to download and open the document in Microsoft Office on your local computer.    Once the file is downloaded into MS Word, all of the complex layout features such as fonts, margins, tables, etc. are still there and work correctly. 

In summary – First impressions of Google Cloud Connect and Google Documents for Small Businesses:

• Easy to set up
• Simple to sign-into
• Easy to upload
• Quick
• Integrates well with MS Office
• Sharing and Collaboration is a breeze
• Online viewing and editing is not yet seamless