Office 365

• Posted on April 28, 2011
• in Technology
• by tegbains

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Microsoft has finally launched Office 365 in a public beta format. It took a couple of days for my application’s approval to process. Microsoft has done a very good job at providing a web interface for administrating the Exchange and profile management features. I’m still waiting for my Lync setup to be provisioned.

Office Web Apps (Word, Excel, and PowerPoint) are quite amazing, but not quite a full desktop replacement. I tried to drag an image file into my web based Word session and the results were not good; I not only didn’t have an embedded image, but the document that I was working on was not saved. I only lost a few minutes of work, but that state-less nature of web browsers can bite you once in a while.

Outlook Web Access works really well, as it is based on Exchange 2010 SP1. I normally don’t use Lync or OCS, so I was happily surprised to see the presence tools built-in.

All of my testing has been in Safari on MacOS X 10.6.7. It’s a night and day difference with Microsoft’s support of web browsers from even four years ago. Exchange webmail was a much hated “feature” on non-IE browser platforms.

Tags: Cloud, Microsoft, Office365