Office 365 review: First look

Office 365 is the successor to Microsoft's current Business Productivity Online Services (BPOS). It combines cloud-hosted Exchange, Forefront Online Protection for Exchange (anti-virus and spam) and SharePoint - including the Access, Excel and InfoPath Forms Services that move what were once hard-to-automate desktop features onto servers where you can scale, automate and secure them.

There’s also Lync Online and the Office Web Apps with (optional) licences for the full version of Office Professional Plus and a SharePoint-based public website for small businesses.

The theory behind Office 365 is you can use it as an online replacement for email, unified communications and file sharing, benefitting from the full Office feature set. Alternatively, you can use it to federate your existing on-premise servers to give you the same level of control and configuration with far less management and maintenance.

Microsoft doesn’t expect users to visit the Office 365 home page often. It’s more to showcase the range of tools and services.

For an enterprise it promises convenience, for a small business it’s far cheaper and simpler than buying and managing a server. But how much of the on-premise server power do you get and is it really ready for businesses to rely on? The public beta has arrived so let’s find out…

For users, Office 365 means extra features in the Office desktop client apps for sharing information. There’s a web portal with Outlook Web Access and SharePoint access, along with the same Office Web Apps as on Windows Live. The latter is, alas, incomplete but useful. You can safely round-trip even complex formatting and collaborate live on PowerPoint, OneNote and Excel. Though if you want to co-edit Word documents you’ll still need the full version.

Users get the same features in Outlook Web App as in Outlook – or you can set OOO messages for them.

In essence, everything you can do online can also be carried out directly inside the familiar Windows apps. You also get mobile email, calendar and contacts on most devices. BlackBerry users without BES (BlackBerry Exchange Server), as with Exchange Server only get push email and will have to sync calendar and contacts over USB from Outlook.

Control who can do what in Exchange Online for support and auditing.

In fact, without Exchange, SharePoint and Lync, several key business features of Office apps don’t work:

*Getting a warning someone is out of the office as soon as you type their email address.

*Seeing that the person who made a change to your document is online so you can ask them what they meant in an IM or video call.

*Attaching a link to a shared file so you don’t end up with five sets of comments to read and merge.

*Taking shared files offline and automatically uploading and merging changes when you get back to the office.

*Turning email replies automatically into a database.

*Being able to see when the colleagues you’re trying to arrange a meeting with are all in the office so you can create an online meeting and invite them.

*Collaborating in a document to make changes.

*Getting My Site blogs for every employee that lists their areas of expertise.

Lync also gives you the online meetings option but you get presence information when coupled with the other servers . And you can give PowerPoint presentations as well as sharing your desktop or app windows.