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An analyst who has been playing with Microsoft's Office 365 has said that the system is not ready to come out of beta yet.
CEO Steve Ballmer has told the world+dog that the service will launch this month and is currently drafting a speech about the service's future on June 28.
Paul Burns of Neovise told Reseller that although he was a big fan of Office 365, and thinks it will do very well, he would be surprised if it was ready by June.
Burns uses Office 365 beta for himself and five part-time employees, and plans to continue using the service at the small-business rate of $6 per person per month once it becomes generally available.
He said that there are important features missing from Office 365 including the ability to import contacts from an Outlook client into a shared global address list that can be accessed by all employees through an Exchange server.
Microsoft insists that Office 365 customers to either manually enter each email address one by one, or use PowerShell. But PowerShell requires users to work in a command-line interface, and small-business users don't really have the time for that.
Microsoft insists that it provides tools to small businesses to migrate users and mailboxes from other services, however its dependence on something as user friendly as a piranha does make one wonder how ready the software is for the mainstream.
Generally the feeling is that Office 365 is good but it could be stuffed up if holes like this are not fixed in time.
For example while Office 365 lets you connect to up to five POP or IMAP email accounts, it only checks the extra accounts once an hour by default. Checking them manually requires a couple of steps.
Waiting an hour before connected mail accounts will be checked is pretty silly particularly for a smaller outfit which needs instant responses.
Some beta testers complain that calendar tasks not syncing properly with a Windows mobile phone, and others had trouble creating SharePoint sites.
Burns noticed that emails were not making it and there is a status dashboard which is as useful as a chocolate teapot.
Several people told him they received bounce-back emails while trying to contact him, the Office 365 dashboard insisted there were no problems at all.
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Look at Windows Phone. It was rushed to market unfinished and half-baked, and missing vital features.
The trouble with Microsoft's cloud services is that it tends to tie you into everything Microsoft, and people probably don't want to leap into Microsoft's garden.
Office 365 is not polished and seems years behind Google docs. And how are you going to use it on a phone? Oh no, you have to buy one of those dreadful Windows Phones to go with it, and then you're sucked into using Microsoft's maps and Bing. At least it uses IMAP (which Hotmail still won't allow).
Those small businesses that use Office 360, and have to wait an hour between emails, will be pulling their hair out (that might make them start to resemble Ballmer after using it for a week or so).
Right now I am converting a client from Google Apps to Office 365 because they dislike the mish-mash of products thrown together. They love the integration of Office 365 to Microsoft Office 210…a complete, rich, consistent set of tools that has evolved with literally hundreds of thousands of man-years in development behind it.
In response to specific trivial items of concern…
- Shared Contacts….use SharePoint… load your contacts into a list and connect to Outlook…done.
- POP/IMAP accounts…so what? I’ve deployed over a thousand BPOS/O365 accounts and have had 1 request for a POP mailbox.
- Slow items being delivered….I and my clients find that eMail & calendar items are delivered to all client devices in less than 60 seconds. Typically, is more like 10.
- If you ever read any of the entries in the Dashboard you can see that they are written by humans who summarize issues that have been reported by several clients. Periodic progress updates are then provided as a status update. This is best practice from ITIL for operational quality and effectiveness.
- If you want to find out the cause of a specific NDR you have to have an experienced Microsoft Cloud partner to diagnose the issue. Apparently you’re not one.