Does your company use Office 365?

[skiprat]

Our company will soon be changing to use this and I was wondering how others get on with it?
I didn't think it was suitable for large companies. We have over 3000 people in the UK and around 150 000 worldwide.

I'm a complete dinosaur with IT stuff, but I would be scared to have everything floating around in the web..

Any pros or cons that you guys are aware of?

 

[Crashmph]

It does make it easier to manage if you do not have the internal resources or expertiese to manage MS Exchange on your own. I know a few business that are using it now and they have been quite happy with it so far. I the last 18 months of usage, they have only experienced one outage for a few hours.

 

[brownsfn2]

I manage a software product that migrates mailboxes to Office 365. If deployed correctly your users will not even know since they can still use the Outlook client for their mail, appointments, etc. The challenge comes in when there is a routing issue or Office 365 goes down. Then you find that you 1 customer among many in a queue to get your issues resolved. There is no one to go to locally at your company that can fix the issue.

Over all it does reduce costs and requires a much smaller footprint on premise. Although now I am breaking into my webcast dialogue that I like to deliver.

There are a lot of UK and European customers that are really concerns with the NSA and the Patriot Act etc. Although Microsoft has been doing a good job of calming those fears and making sure that the Office 365 tenants are created either in the same country as the customer or a country nearby.

We deal with companies that have migrated over 10k users to office 365 and we have performed migrations for some pretty large on premise situations as well (100k plus).

150k is the largest company I have heard of yet moving to Office 365.

If you are responsible for the migration and want to talk more let me know. I would be happy to point you in the right direction or offer advice.

 

[Ed McDonnell]

It all reminds me of the old timesharing days. It's not a model I want to return to and I will resist it to the bitter end.

Skydrive was down the other day and good luck if you needed to get some work done.

With each passing year I become less enamored with evolutions in tech, which seem more like intellectual devolution to me.

Ed

 

[skiprat]

Thanks Ron, but I'm just a Blue Collar Spanner Monkey / Sparky.:biggrin:
We have a huge IT department, an international 24hr Helpdesk and full time IBM employees based in most of our sites.

I was just trying to get a heads-up to see how miserable my life is going to be made while I learn the new tricks. :redface:
I've been here for over 33 years and I just got over using Lotus 123!!!

 

[brownsfn2]

Lotus 123? You do have problems then.

I work for Dell in the software group. I would love to know if we are working with your company though. If you feel comfortable and want to PM me the name I will promise that I will not do anything with the information. It will just satisfy my curiosity.

 

[PenMan1]

Our company, about a half million of us, are moving away from Microsoft and the "laptop ball and chain". We are moving toward iOS, Android, and Google products such as Google Drive.

Some still use MS 365, but not many. We like being able to share docs, spreadsheets, presentations via Google. Additionally, Google Cloud Print allows us to print to any printer, ANYWHERE that is Internet connected.

With new release of Google Chromecast, we also like the ability to send presentations (we do millions) wirelessly from a tablet directly to a clients TV.

MS 365 is ok and secure. For us, it is just easier to share and collaborate our work with the Google products. AND the software is free to do word processing, spreadsheets, presentations. Google will also translate the Office products to Google or leave them native.

 

[skiprat]

Ron, it's no secret that I work for a company called ABB.
I suspect that our IT dept in our head office in Zurich, Switzerland has it all under control. The Swiss are normally pretty sharp and perhaps even more precise than the Germans.

 

[brownsfn2]

Love to hear that Andy. I truly believe there is not enough competition in the collaboration platform space. Microsoft needs valid competition that keeps prices low and keeps them on their toes to deliver quality solutions. Google is a great competitor in that regards but they need to get better at it. I really wish they would improve their Android OS for laptop and desktop based systems and make is something that corporations can more easily manage and deploy.

Darn. Now I have done it. I crossed work with pen turning. Back to work now.