Office 365 - The future in the Cloud?



Microsoft's latest Office release, 2013 is available as a cloud service for those wanting to transition to hosted services but retain familiar products. Microsoft haven't taken the decision to offer their Office software as a service lightly, they made their empire selling software licenses. But under pressure from Google who believe software should not be a commodity to be sold but a service to be offered, they've had to evolve. The result is 365. A monthly subscription from $4 - $22 per user, per month depending upon the plan chosen buys you access to your very own Office infrastructure which goes much further than the usual applications housed within Office Professional plus, we also get SharePoint online, Exchange online and Lync online. That's office applications, e-mail, telephony including enterprise voice, messaging, presence, storage, anti-spam / anti-virus, and websites all in one neat package.

Microsoft Office 365

Its not just installed software that 365 is replacing, its the infrastructure required to support it; the fault tolerant and load balanced clusters of servers in our data centres running Exchange, Lync, SharePoint, infrastructure services on Windows Server such as DFS and WDS. And the end-points themselves don't need to have the hardware to support new Office apps, moreover we don't have the costly budget required to plan, deploy, manage and support the servers and applications. We also save on our electricity bill and can claim we are lowering our carbon footprint, going green as we have fewer servers to power and therefore fewer servers to keep cool.

At first look then, it seems that Office 365 is an obvious evolution of a well-established ecosystem which will replace the more traditional on-premise provision we are accustomed to.
However there are a few caveats to address. Firstly 365 hasn't been the amazing success many predicted, it has uptake just not a lot. Feedback from the CEO's and business leaders I meet centre around the issue of privacy. Looking after your data yourself seems a safer bet than handing it all over to some faceless company, location unknown even if it is Microsoft. There has been a lot of hubbub in business exec circles over just such matters. Secondly as a permanent Internet connection is required you lose almost all productivity ability if your line drops. Lastly even though Microsoft quote a 99.9% availability and SLA there seems to be a question mark over reliability.

On the first issue of Privacy, Microsoft have the capability and investment to do a far better job of protecting your data both confidentiality and integrity than most medium sized enterprises can. They simply can't justify the investment in the required technology and configuration costs. This also feeds into the final issue of reliability, everyone thinks are a better driver than the guy next to then on the freeway and every decenter manager thinks they can make their data more available than Microsoft can. This just simply isn't the case for most organisations who could not justify the expense ensuring no single point of failure and complete fault tolerance. Microsoft can and have.
For the issue of connectivity to the cloud services careful consideration needs to be placed on which ISP's are used, available bandwidth and physically how you connect to the cloud.

365 will appeal most to smaller organisations who cannot afford the infrastructure and support required to have access to some of the services such as those provided by Lync or SharePoint. This certainly levels the playing field for them and with fewer users to license can be very cost effective. Many smaller organisations will be taking advantages of these new tools for the first time.
For larger enterprises though there are barriers. Firstly they are likely to already own significant server infrastructure running older versions of the platforms in question so there is no immediate lowering of TCO. Also with a much larger user base to license it could end up costing them more than on-premise equivalents. The support cost savings may also not be as great as first thought because they'll have a fairly autonomous application deployment solution via System Centre and as for reducing required desktop footprints they probably have provision for App-V or VDI solutions.

Without a significant sign up from the larger enterprises out there 365 will remain a flop however Microsoft provide many routes and they all lead to 365 in some form.
For instance a corp looking to Migrate it's Exchange environment to a newer version on newer hardware has license costs to bear, new hardware to procure and staff training to source. The migration itself is a time consuming activity and that's more cost.
Exchange Online may be a solution, from just a few $ per user per month it offers a way to gradually ease into 365 retaining Lync, SharePoint and Office as on-site hosted solutions.
With a significant range of user plans available corps can choose which user group is suited to which plan, mix and match. Their periodic large Cap-ex will shift to a more frequent but lower Op-ex.

Another point in favour of Office 365 is the surge of execs requesting iPads as their business tools rather than a Windows based notebook or tablet. Never intended for this purpose the iPad / iPhone has become the tool of choice for many senior level staff. Why? They are seen as fashion accessories, form over function, they have them at home, everyone they know has one so they want one for work. Speaking from personal experience attempting to convince a board room of fruit users that an iPad isn't a suitable business tool for a whole range of reasons is a great deal more challenging that it may seem.
Well they can now have their cake and eat it as all that's required on the client is a web browser. It means that corps pursuing BYOD's now have a perfect platform to base it on.

In recent years Microsoft's tactics have changed, coincidentally this seemed to be around the time Bill stepped down as CEO. For those taking note, Microsoft ecosystems of desktop, server, messaging, telephony, collaboration etc. are gravitating toward each other, converging on identical management interfaces both GUI based and PowerShell with common goals and Interoperability between products and services is better than ever. It seems Microsoft have had a revolution and Office 365 is just one Lync in a much bigger chain. Conspiracy theorists be warned.

Office is dead, long live Office.

Microsoft Lync Returning us to 1973

It's the 70's, David Bowies Life on Mars is playing on the radio, on your desk there's a notepad, pen and a telephone. Your in-tray contains some memos which need your attention. A business workflow has just started; to complete it we require some information from Gene Hunt on the second floor. We can either pick up the phone and dial his extension, or walk up the stairs to his office. It's that simple. 

(Life on Mars, (c) BBC)

Let's assume we dial (literally) his extension, there's a busy tone. We could wait a few minutes and try later or walk up the stairs to his office. We go up the stairs and knock on his office door, we open it and see that Gene is on the phone still, he holds up his hand, come back in five. Ok so we now have a choice, go find someone else who might have the information we require, or wait five minutes to speak to Gene. We wait the five minutes, get the information required, go back to our desk and complete the workflow.

Now let's jump forward to 2012. Same office, same desk, only now we have a VoIP phone, a desktop PC connected to the corporate network, and e-mail. There have been other changes also, the mesh of Internet communication allows staff that were once confined to the same building because their workflows were connected and communication between them too difficult to achieve over distance to be spread around the globe.
So using the example above we require the same information from Gene, but he's no longer based in our building, his department was moved last year to the head office site.
We can still pick up the phone and dial his extension but he's on another call so we are redirected to his voice mail. We leave him a message. We are not certain when he'll check his voice mail we send him an e-mail also.
Now we wait, we can't complete the workflow without the information from Gene and as we've requested it we've done our job, right?

Although the modern "connected" office has brought an array of new tools designed to increase efficiency we have also introduced the issue of Human Latency; the induced delay as we spend time locating who to call, how to call them, and wait for our response. Our synchronous communications; telephone calls, face to face chat have been replaced with asynchronous systems via e-mail and voice mail.

Let's review the same situation from above but this time in an environment that has invested in Microsoft Lync unified communications. We need the information from Gene to complete our workflow. Maybe first we should ask how do we know Gene will have what we need? In the 70's departments occupied the same office space, we knew everyone, we had "presence". Today we may have never have actually met Gene and know little more about him than his job title. With Lync we search for all staff within a specific department, then hover over contact cards for details of who is likely to be best to ask, or use a skill search. There are three people in our organisation that can help, but which one to ask. This is where presence comes in, mirroring reality we can determine not only who is at their desk but from that list who is most likely to be available. In the 70's we just had to look up from our desk and scan the office, Johns not at his desk, no point in asking him, Bill is on the phone he can't help right now but Sally looks to be available. It is the same with Presence in Lync, only the fact that all of the above work at different locations presents no issue to us.
We see that Gene's presence state is green  meaning he's at his desk and not on the phone. Now we need to get his attention, before we would have knocked on his door, in Lync we send him a toast, usually an IM "Hello Gene, can you spare a minute?" Once we get the reply we can choose how to continue, if its simple we may handle the whole exchange with IM, or we may swap to a voice call. If theres written information to be seen we may send him a file, or paste it into an e-mail. With Lync we can alter the mode of communication without ever leaving the client. Everything is very ubiquitous.

So we've returned to 1973, but it's improved, we have mobility. Our communication end points can be our smart phones, tablet PC's or any computer using Lync Web App.
If Gene is not at his desk he can still receive our IM, we can still one-click call his mobile from his contact card. If he's at his desk when we call but needs to go elsewhere he can move the call to his mobile. We can receive our voice mails as e-mail transcriptions with Lync / Exchange unified messaging. Voice driven auto attendants allow us to check and book meetings, or room resources, reply to e-mails and reschedule appointments from our cars hands free, on the move.

There are many reasons why Lync is a worthy investment, application level integration being up there among the top but its ability to diminish human latency is a key selling point as it's this statistic which we can easily show a positive change to ROI. Lync really is a credible replacement for IP-PBX driven telephony but it offers so much more than that it is a true end to end integrated communications platform and in that regard it stands alone.