This morning we posted about some video resources for Microsoft’s Office 365. Well today is also the day that Office 365 is launched and is no longer a beta!
What Is Office 365?
According to Microsoft:
It’s anywhere access to email, documents, contacts, and calendars so you’re always up-to-date. It’s familiar Microsoft productivity applications your team already uses. It’s business-class security and reliability. It’s IT control and efficiency delivered to fit your organization’s unique needs. And it’s an all in one pay-as-you-go service with an affordable price. But that’s just the beginning.
Cost wise, Office 365 for professionals and small businesses if just £4 per month (under Plan P) and for that you get a 25 GB mailbox with 25 MB attachments with Exchange Online, and much more. For me, that is worth it just for the Exchange account! This is also on a month to month subscription basis so no more long term contracts!
I have been using Office 365 during the months of the beta and I was very happy with it.
In fact, I am in the process now of signing up properly.
Learn more about Office 365 from here
I looked at Office 365 – but for the few small businesses and non-profits I support, it’s really not worth it. SBS 2011 – especially with charity licensing – is a much better long term deal. Now if you don’t have anyone technical you can lean on, I can see the value in Office 365 – but I think longer term it’s still better to cultivate a relationship with someone technical and host in-house.
The last non-profit I upgraded to SBS 2011 was around $2K for the hardaware and software. Since the existing network was a mess (code for “grew organically over 7 years”) I opted to do the “rip and replace” – had two days of migrating data and workstations. If you had to pay someone, probably another $1K to $2K. At $72 a user per year in three years thats $3K – we typically get at least six out of an SBS install so I would effectively be paying for it twice.
I think this SBS 2011 server could go eight easy – I’m extremely pleased at how well SBS 2011 work. It’s a dramatic improvement over SBS 2003! That would skew the TCO equation into owned/hosted even further.
Having said that, I think there will be tons of people where this is VERY appealing. I think I will recommend the email/sharepoint solution to a few friends who are sole proprietors and using really basic email and no collaboration tools. For them I do think it’s a no-brainer. And if MS doesn’t mess up the marketing message it should be hugely successful.
Thanks Eric – thats a really good point, worth noting.
So is the email, calendar part the same as the features of Exchange Server? I’m going over the site but didn’t test out the beta. I suppose you could use your own domain name with it?
Hi Holt – yes, you get all the features of Exchange, plus Sharepoint, plus a website, plus a few other things. And yes, you can use your own domain name 🙂 I’m paying more than that at the moment just for a single hosted Exchange mailbox, and thats on Exchange 2007, not 2010!
That’s right. I do now remember comparing Office 365 a few months ago with Google Apps. I’ll have to check out how the website hosting works if you have several domains. Linux hosting plans are cheeper and let you create subdomains and such the webmail (like Horde) that uses IMPA protocols stinks compared to exchange server. And your are right, it’s cheaper than hosted Exchange places like the big one that registers domains among others.