ESP Projects Ltd: IT Support - Sheffield

What Is it? Office 365 is the latest addition to the ever popular Microsoft Office environment. Whilst new PC-based versions of the familiar suite will continue to be released in future, Microsoft are now firmly entering the ‘Cloud’ market and competing with GoogleApps with this new web-based service.

What Does Office 365 Do? It’s essentially a suite of slimmed down versions of Word, Excel, Outlook, PowerPoint etc. which instead of being installed on PCs, are accessed through a web browser. This means you can access and share your files from most internet-enabled PCs. It also contains an online version of Microsoft Exchange, the email and calendar-sharing application. This means that you can do ‘out-of-office’ autoresponders, open and use other users mailboxes and calendars, and create shared calendars/mailboxes for your staff to access. There are also some other useful services thrown in including Instant Messaging, voice & video calling and a website creation tool.

How Much Is Office365? The ‘small business’ service must be bought through a Microsoft Reseller such as ESP, is paid for by credit card and costs £4 per user per month.

You can have between 1 and 25 users on the system and these numbers can go up and down as much as you like as there is no minimum term.  You even get a cash-backed SLA on the 99.99% uptime guarantee.

Who Should Use Office 365? In our view, the service is ideal for particular customers. We think it’s worth looking at in more detail for new organisations with no existing IT systems; organisations with no server but a need to share documents and/or an email/calendar system; organisations working across multiple office-bases and also those with a lot of remote/outreach/peripatetic workers. It is strongly advised to speak to ESP about an implementation and administration plan before ordering.

Anything Else I Need to Know? Yes! Lets take look at three of the major stumbling blocks to adoption. Please do contact us for more detailed information.

1)            If you plan to use it to replace an existing email system, *all* your users would have to adopt Office 365. Whilst it integrates very well with Outlook 2010 & 2007, it doesn’t work with 2003. In these cases, there might be quite significant transition costs to account for, as well as the subscription fees.  Talk to ESP about your project in more detail and we can help firm up the costs for you.

2)            If you plan to use it as your sole or main Office suite, you do need to check in some detail that the ‘slimmed-down’ versions of the software do actually do the things you need! They have necessarily been curtailed from the ‘full’ versions, so you need to know what is missing.

3)            With Office 365, everything is stored on the internet and outside the UK. Although Microsoft promise backups of most of the data, you may have concerns over the security of your data, whether this form of storage might contravene any Data Protection policy you have in place, and whether the backup is rigorous enough for you.