Ah bless, they're all playing catch up with someone or other.

Microsoft rolls out Office 365 in cloud computing race
In rolling out Office 365, the online version of its Microsoft Office suite, Microsoft is looking to catch up to Google in the race to move business software to the cloud.

By David Sarno, Los Angeles Times

June 29, 2011
Microsoft Corp., the 800-pound gorilla of the software world, is hoping it can lift itself into the cloud.

In rolling out Office 365, the online version of its ubiquitous Microsoft Office suite, the Redmond, Wash., technology giant is looking to catch up to rival Google Inc. in the race to move business software residing on local computers to remote data centers accessible from anywhere.

For a monthly fee starting at $6 per user, Office 365 will allow company employees to edit and store Word documents, Excel spreadsheets and PowerPoint presentations online and communicate with one another via email, instant message or video chat as they work on projects together, an element Microsoft said would allow workers to get more done. Larger companies and those looking for more features will pay more per month.

Cloud proponents say companies can cut costs by getting rid of their own servers — which are expensive and require frequent maintenance and security updates — and allowing technology firms like Microsoft and Google to handle the hard work of supplying businesses' computing needs.

"What happens when Microsoft Office meets the cloud?" Chief Executive Steve Ballmer said at a presentation Tuesday. "Collaboration happens in addition to productivity, anywhere for any business of any size."

Though Microsoft has for years had a cloud element to its Office suite, the company has struggled to catch up to Google in the online software race. The search giant says its Google Apps software, which also includes word processing, email and other business applications, is used by 3 million businesses and 30 million people around the world.

Still, that number is a small fraction of the 1 billion global users Microsoft says it has for its traditional Office suite, which for years has been its bestselling product. In 2010, Microsoft's Business Division, which makes Office, was responsible for 30% of the company's $64 billion in annual revenue.

As businesses increasingly buy into the advantages of the cloud, high-profile companies including Google, Amazon.com Inc. and IBM are competing to be the provider of choice. But with a huge existing customer base, Microsoft is looking to convince its users that moving to the cloud will be easier and less risky if they stick with the familiar Microsoft Office.

"The reality is that Microsoft already has these customers and should easily be able to retain them," said Brad Reback, an analyst at Oppenheimer and Co. "Businesses in general, especially with something as critical as email, are loath to switch companies like that."

Microsoft has already encountered a number of difficulties with the precursor to Office 365, called BPOS (for Business Productivity Online Suite). The BPOS system has seen a number of outages in recent months, including a three-day period in May when many customers had to wait up to six hours to receive emails. Microsoft later told customers it had "not been timely enough with information" about the system's status.

A flurry of hacker attacks in recent months has also renewed questions about the vulnerability of data stored online. In cloud computing, information from many companies can reside on servers at a single data center, potentially allowing hackers to attack multiple targets at once.

As soon as Microsoft announced Office 365 on Tuesday, Google went on the offensive with a blog post entitled "365 reasons to consider Google Apps."

"Upgrading platforms and adding features results in systems that are increasingly difficult to manage and complex to use," the post started. "At times like these, it's worth considering a clean slate: an approach based on entirely modern technologies, designed for today's world."

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Office 365: First Impressions
By Kevin Kieller, enableUC | Jun 29, 2011 | No comments yet ...
Microsoft officially launched Office 365 today and here is a first impression. First a rapid summary of what is included in Office 365:
Office 365 includes email through hosted Exchange and the Outlook Web App (browser based access to email, calendar and contacts) or the full version of Outlook installed on your Windows desktop or Macintosh computer--although according to the online documentation only Outlook 2007 and Outlook 2010 are currently supported.
Office 365 also includes Microsoft Lync, which provides instant messaging, presence, audio calling, desktop video conferencing and web conferencing. Currently you can only call between other Lync users; that is, you cannot place calls to or receive calls from the PSTN (regular telephone numbers). This might change in the future. To use Lync, you must download and install the Lync application on your Windows computer. The on-premise version of Lync does support Macintosh users, however it is not clear that Office 365 does at this point.
Lync does allow users to connect with users at other organizations (federation) and does allow Office 365 Lync users to communicate with Windows Live users as well using IM, audio or video. I see this as a very powerful feature. (See my previous The Day the PSTN Died post for more related thoughts.) Office 365 does NOT support IM, audio or video with AOL or Yahoo! Users. And there is no mention of any integration with Google users!
Office 365 Lync can also, through a third party contract, be enabled to support dial-in conferencing. With this setup, Lync acts as your company’s conference bridge and users can join a conference from a standard telephone.
In terms of hosted Microsoft Office, Office 365 includes Web-based versions of Word, PowerPoint, Excel and OneNote. These are basic versions of the standard Microsoft Office applications; more details on this below.
Depending on the Office 365 package you subscribe to, you may also be licensed to use and install the full Microsoft Office applications. I have seen criticism of Microsoft because there are multiple subscription plans, but to be fair, I think Microsoft has provided options for organizations that already own Microsoft Office licenses, which you can then "connect" to Office 365 online.
And lastly, Office 365 also includes a version of Sharepoint that allows you to create team sites, web sites, project sites or many other types of sites--all of which can either be private or public.
In my opinion, the lifeblood that courses through most organizations' veins is email and documents.
Office 365 handles email very well, however with "...over 1 billion Microsoft Office users...", according to Steve Ballmer, there are many, many existing documents to be moved, shared, read, and updated.
So how does the hosted Office 365 Web Apps handle Office documents? I would say mediocre at best.
As a quick test, I uploaded and tried to edit my most recent Word, Excel and PowerPoint documents with mixed results:
Word--Document displayed fine online. I needed to convert document to edit it and when I was editing, the document was clearly not WYSIWYG, however once saved and reopened in the full version of Word, the formatting was perfectly preserved, including fonts, tables and page breaks.
Excel--Document displayed fine online however I was not able to edit it because a message said the documented contained a number of unsupported features. It did offer that I could save a copy and then open this copy for editing. I didn’t have time to bother trying this.
PowerPoint--Document displayed fine and I was able to edit the text of the slides. I was not able to edit any images (or even reposition an image). I was also not able to insert SmartArt or a picture or a table. I was able to read and edit slide notes.
For a quick comparison I then uploaded and tried to edit the same documents with Google Apps and had even less success:
Word--Document displayed close to correct. I was able to edit, however this process changed fonts, tables and page breaks. In fact for this specific document, after editing in Google Apps the tables were modified such that printing the document afterwards from Word caused many table columns to "spill off" the page.
Excel--I was able to edit the document but once again this process irrevocably altered the original and in fact caused some existing formulas to no longer be valid--it seems that some named ranges were not preserved in the process.
PowerPoint--I could view the document with some minor font issues and the included SmartArt graphics did not display. I could NOT edit the document.
*Note that the actual edit capabilities in both Office 365 and Google Apps depends on your operating system and browser version. I happened to be using a Windows Vista machine with Internet Explorer 9 for my tests.