The IT industry is moving at breakneck speed at the moment. A few years ago it was all so simple at the smaller end of the market.
A company would come to us with 10 or more users and say they need help sharing files and their pop/imap email hosting is groaning. “Get a small business server” you’d say, “one size fits all” (as long as you aren’t bigger than 75 users). They’d get a windows server, exchange email and active directory authentication all in one box! Unheard of in the enterprise world which needed three or more servers to do provide the same functionality.
Then along came the catchily named, Microsoft Business Productivity Online Suite, or BPOS for short. This was Microsoft cloud v1. A quick rebrand and upgrade and this became Office 365, and that system had a complete upgrade last year and is now in version 3! As everyone who uses Microsoft products, version 3 is when they get it right.
Office 365 is hosted files and emails from Microsoft themselves. “why host your own email server when we can host it for you”? Get rid of that sbs box and get a small business essentials box. One size fits all (as long as you aren’t bigger than 25 users)
That was about the last time anything was simple!
Questions, questions
What if I’m bigger than 25 users?
What is the difference between Office 2013 and Office 365?
Can i host files in office 365?
Can i have one logon for everything?
What is a skydrive?
What is sharepoint?
Even for us it can sometimes be hard to keep up, however we are migrating customers to office 365 almost daily now and it’s a great time to review your IT. For example, if you have a SBS 2003 server, accessing your files without a VPN is almost impossible and if you have the latest version of Office, 2013, you can’t even connect to your email server, you have to use the old 2003 owa or try and get copies of 2010 on the black market, or via volume licensing.
With Windows Essentials server or Office 365 all your files and emails are directly accessible via the web and it can all be automatically to your PC, mobile phone, ipad, tablet, blackberry you name it. Sync is the new backup and disaster recovery! Although having said that, enterprise cloud backup has finally come of age and is now affordable but that’s another topic.
At Jolly IT we are using all this internally and are about to start using Microsoft Dynamics CRM Online, hopefully I’ll be able to write about that in the next blog!
Recent Comments