Microsoft has been offering business cloud services for some time, starting with its LiveMeeting conferencing product, and more recently its BPOS cloud servers.
LiveMeeting may have been easy to use, but BPOS needed as much as hand-holding as your own server farm.
Meanwhile the free and paid versions of Google Apps proved far easier to exploit and manage, while free tools such as Google Docs formed a useful ad hoc collaboration platform — making them popular with enterprises of all sizes.
Now Microsoft has released Office 365, its revamped and redesigned cloud service. A multi-tenant suite of the latest Office services and servers, Office 365 is designed to give users an easier way to run Exchange, SharePoint and its Lync voice, conferencing and messaging platform, without needing additional hardware and systems management. But will the new service allow Microsoft to compete with Google and the rest of the cloud world?
ZDNet UK talked to Microsoft UK's managing director Gordon Frazer and to Gurdeep Singh Pall, corporate vice president of the Office Lync and Speech, about how Microsoft plans to compete in the cloud, and how Office 365 will evolve.
Small businesses are using free services already. How will you get them to switch to a subscription service such as Office 365?
GF: You will see very small businesses use free mail services such as Hotmail and Gmail. But once somebody wants to get beyond basic email services — the ability to do real document sharing, co-authoring, those kinds of solutions — you step into a pay-for service, even if it's not Microsoft.
If somebody wants to have just basic free email, that option is available. But if you want to want to think about what you can really do with it, you have enterprise capability in email and SharePoint. The conversation is about richness and features, going beyond free email and basic services.
GSP: Some other workloads — for example, Lync Online — you can't get that free. You'd have to pay a lot of money to get that separately from Citrix or WebEx. Here those capabilities are part of the price.
Who can you connect to with Lync Online and how can you connect to business partners, suppliers, and customers that also use Lync?
GSP: By default, Office 365 will federate you to the Windows Live Messenger cloud — and to the AOL cloud. We will also have open federation, so any other company using Lync that wants to federate with Office 365-hosted tenants, they can do that. Beyond that, it depends on the other enterprise. Microsoft is already using Lync to federate with 2,000 companies.
– Gordon Frazer, Microsoft
The conversation is about richness and features, going beyond free email and basic services.
We support two modes of federation. Open federation is where the enterprise says I'm not going to have any whitelists or blacklists, you go in and say, "joe@intel.com" and automatically Lync will establish the connection to the other Lync server. Or you can have blacklists and whitelists.
When it comes to secure connections, we will assert versions. We will say we'll not support the lower version of Lync if it would be a security issue.
Do you handle all the digital certificates needed?
GSP: Office 365 handles certification as part of the provisioning process. All that is plumbed all the way through. Whether you're using Exchange or Lync Online or federation, we'll get all those certificates issued and you don't need to worry about that. I think there is enough suffering in the world already.
When will the upgrade to support voice come?
GSP: Voice capabilities — so you can have your phone number through Lync Online — are going to be coming after release, and we're on track for that. We've done a partnership with O2 to bring those capabilities to market. We're partnering with others that we're not ready to announce yet.
We think voice is going to become a really integrated capability. As a business owner you can go in, assign phone numbers, get your voicemail. With respect to Skype, we see this as...
Talkback
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Hoped I'd like what Microsoft's men had to say, even if only for information, but again I'm infuriated by the extremely misleading verbage that probably seems perfectly OK to the average technologically gullible end user.
For instance, Gurdeep Singh Pall answers the question about digital certificates with a sweeping statement that all certificates will be issued with no worry to you, as well as stating that he thinks there's already enough suffering in the world. A few of my colleagues and I have found that MS is the source of a lot of the suffering in the world in the context of digital certificates. Try setting up one of the latest SBS servers with any of the most recent versions of Outlook on a network which doesn't have a FQDN for their Internet connection (as is the case with a huge load of small businesses) and see whether you don't keep getting certificare error messages, or passwords being asked for despite using MAPI. Sure, there are fixes, but why should you have to bust a gut just to get a PAID FOR system to run without annoying the wits out of your boss/manager/customer/anyone-else-who-can-make-your-life-a-misery-by-moaning-non-stop-and-withholding-payment-until-they're-happy?
Then Gurdeep Singh Pall later says that small businesses found hardware servers to be priced right out of reach and only large enterprises could afford a server. But now you can afford Office-In-The-Cloud. I think he's going back over 20 years on that one. And his answer to the notion of putting IT support pro's out of work who supported small businesses with a server (assuming they could ever afford one) was worthy of the best politicians who never actually manage to answer any of your questions whilst at the same time making lots and lots of noise as their lips move.
If I could sell like the guys at Microsoft I'd probably have been able to pay all the standing orders this month, but as it is I can still hold my (poor) head high and sleep at night because I only sell what my customers need - my time. I offer Linux-based servers where appropriate and MS where that's better for them, such as migrating from an old MS server and the fuddy duddies are averse to change.
And if you managed to read to the end of this, then good on you.
FPDW
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@Pop - that kind of certificate pain with a physical server is exactly what Pall is comparing using a cloud service that provides the service for you to, so I think you might be making his point for him. On the servers, we're discussing not a physical server but the Office server products (Exchange, Lync, Sharepoint, Project Server, Visio Server etc) which very few companies have a full set or recent versions of. I have noticed that whenever I write about features in Outlook that need a recent version of Exchange I'll get a crop of comments from users saying they don't get those features with an older version of Exchange, so a cloud service that does the hard work of runnign Exchange and always has the latest version of Exchange is going to be an easy way to take advantage of features in client software you've already paid for...
M