Office 365 with Cloud Services

Microsoft Office is considered a must install software on most of the personal computer. It is a very useful program to help you on documentations, reports, presentation, or some calculation work. The early version of Microsoft Office provides only very few basic functionality such as Microsoft Word, Excel, Power Point, Schedule + (I am not sure how many of you recognize this) and Microsoft Access.

After few versions of enhancement, Microsoft Office extended some of the programs such as Microsoft Visio, Microsoft Project, One Note, FrontPage, or even Microsoft Office Server to provide a comprehensive documentation solution. Personally I like to use Microsoft Outlook as email client as with Outlook I can efficiently manage my emails, calendar, tasks, and most importantly, all these information can be synchronize to my phone.

In previous articles, Raymond mentioned the possibility of using cloud antivirus solution. It is not easy for lots of people to allow those antivirus engines to scan your computer virtually on real time through Internet. But with the new Microsoft Office 365, if we can access our documents, emails, communicate with others virtually anywhere and on any device with browser, everything seems to become possible, as our local machine will no longer store all these sensitive information and we might store all these information virtually on the Internet. Therefore, you may think of installing antivirus agent on your local computer will waste your computer resources.

Office 365 includes Microsoft Office Professional Plus, Microsoft Exchange Online, Microsoft SharePoint Online, Lync Online (Services such as Communicator, video conferencing, etc). With all the capabilities listed above, we know that Microsoft not only turning Microsoft Office to be cloud enabled, also they are looking at total cloud computing solutions, such as emails (Exchange), communication (Office Communicator Server), SharePoint, and cloud computing platform named as Windows Azure.

Cloud computing is an evolution for the computing world. I foresee the above solution will become more popular for the next two years. If the cloud computing widely use by everyone, I believe lots of IT specialist in the world will lose their job. Let’s imagine all the resources are managed centrally and the local machines will just need minimal resources to execute every programs. Also, it will be a lot cheaper to host the entire solution centrally rather than manage by a own self. This really reduce total cost of ownership and also manpower to manage the entire IT infrastructure. Anyway, this is just my thoughts.

Office 365 is still under beta testing. For those who are interested, you can visit below URL to register become a beta tester. I already registered myself, but so far haven’t get any response yet. Wish you luck.
[Register as Beta Tester for Office 365]