Our Move to Office 365

We recently took the decision to move our email and document storage solutions to Microsoft Office 365.

Office 365 is a cloud based service that bundles a number of what have until a few years ago been separate server installed products (in fact you can still purchase and install the products locally if needed). These products are Microsoft Exchange (email), Microsoft SharePoint (documents & collaboration) and newcomer on the block Microsoft Lync (formerly Communications Server). The highest priced feature levels also include a license to install Microsoft Office Professional Plus, which the user can install on up to 5 machines (e.g. at the office and at home).

The service is sold as a monthly per user subscription and has several different feature levels which increase in price, the customer can mix and match and buy differing numbers of subscriptions at different level and can allocate them to appropriate users. This makes the service very flexible as the customer can buy what is need when it is needed and can also scale up and down as well, so he or she is only ever paying for what is used.

I have followed Office 365 (and its predecessor BPOS) for some time as I thought it was something to watch from the moment I first heard of it. So what prompted the move?

• Backup of our data, especially email and our internal SharePoint document repository was getting increasingly larger, impacting the quota available on our online backup service and the time taken to perform the backup (not forgetting the time taken to restore a file from that service if needed
• Both our emails and documents were only available on the machines connected to the company network, and we have been increasingly needing access to both when away from the office
• We also wanted the ability to share documents with customers and be able to collaborate on them, emailing a document or uploading to a web site is neither secure nor particularly efficient
• Our customers (yes you) were expressing increasing interest and we don't like to recommend something that we don't use ourselves

Office 365 ticked all these boxes for us, and setting it up was fairly painless. Our emails are now delivered to Exchange online and all our old emails have been migrated up, so that everything is in a safe, secure store. We've also uploaded our documents and spreadsheets to SharePoint online and are finding it to be much more powerful and customisable than the relatively old installation of SharePoint foundation that we have used on our server.

SharePoint online will also allow us to create up to 300 sub-sites which we can use for various things. For instance we've setup a private document repository for documents that are private to the management team. While documents such as company policies and procedures are readily available in a document store available to everyone in the company, which also has direct access to it from the company SharePoint home page. The improved document searching capability is also proving to be very useful and much easier to use than searching for a file on disk.

When we embark on our next big project I will create a SharePoint sub-site and grant access to it to the customer so that we can easily share documents related to the project. In case you are wondering, you can grant authenticated access to a sub-site and it doesn't require that the user has an Office 365 subscription, making it ideal for private sites where there is a need to share and collaborate.

If you would like to try Office 365 for yourself we offer a free trial - please visit the Office 365 page on our website to sign up.