Posts Tagged bpos
Office 365 drops in price
Posted by Nick Bowyer in Cloud, Office365 on March 15, 2012
Today it was announced by Microsoft that they are to drop the price of the Office 365 products to new and renewing customers. The price drop is around 20% on all subscriptions listed on their site. This doesn’t come as a surprise, not long after the launch of the predecessor to Office 365 (BPOS) Business Productivity Online Suite, the price was cut in half. The explanation for the reduction in price is quoted by Microsoft to come from the increase in efficiency within the systems that run the platform, but its simpler than that…
Microsoft has made no secret of the fact that Google Apps is a target for their Office 365 offering and price is usually one of the biggest talking points when the two are compared. Even with a large customer spending many millions of dollars on IT infrastructure every year a dollar makes a difference. The price conversation just got a whole lot easier for Microsoft, throw in the total cost of deployment and you will find that there is little between the two.
The message is clear, Microsoft are in the cloud game for keeps and the longer they remain there the better they will get at it. The support is second to none, I have been working through a few customer issues recently and think that it could put a lot of IT firms with SLAs to shame. The interface in Office 365 is slick and will only get better.
With Windows 8 and the next version of Office on the horizon the cloud strategy held by Microsoft becomes even more relevant, the integration with the desktop will become tighter and sooner or later cloud will become the way you work…
Transition Complete
Posted by Nick Bowyer in BPOS, Cloud, Office365 on January 29, 2012
It was the easiest Exchange Server upgrade I have ever witnessed! My transition from BPOS to Office 365 is complete. If this is an indication of how painless the migration will be to future versions of the Office 365 product then I am a lifetime customer.
With just over 24 hours of minimal outage I was impressed with the lack of issues along the way. More importantly the other users on my account only noticed their mobile phone email stopped connecting. Thanks to the auto discover record I was able to guide them through changing the settings very easily using just their username (email address) and password. The iPhone setup for email now has a dedicated Microsoft Exchange option and for a novice user it takes less than 30 seconds to complete the setup.
Within Outlook 2010 I was warned on startup that a change had occurred and Outlook advised me to restart. Once I had then I was able to connect to my new Office 365 mailbox, this is important because I didn’t have to re-sync the mailbox with my PC. My mailbox is sitting at around 2Gb at the moment and downloading that amount of information again would have been a pain.
For the 24 hours of the transition period I was not able to see the administrator portal component of Office 365, I could only see Outlook Web App.
I couldn’t have asked for a better experience! Now I am federated with Lync Online you can add me using nick.bowyer@itprofessional.co.nz .
T minus 24 hours
Posted by Nick Bowyer in BPOS, Cloud on January 26, 2012
Well I finally had the notice for my Transition to Office 365 from BPOS a couple of weeks ago. I have to say although the wait has been long I am looking forward to finally being able to run the current versions of Microsoft’s Exchange, Sharepoint and Lync online. The process thus far has been to update my DNS records to reflect the added functionality in Office 365 as well as a simple password change for my administrator accounts. Not as hard as I had expected.
The notification email actually spelt everything out in plain english:
Now I am 24 hours away from the transition date and plan to update you with my experience.
A couple of months ago I attempted to transition myself to Office 365 but when making the change I discovered that the Forefront “Firewall” which deals with the Office 365 and BPOS products didn’t allow this. I understood the technical reasons for the roadblock and patiently waited for the transition team to contact me.
Fingers crossed!
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