Today, Microsoft flips the switch on the latest generation of its Office 365 Enterprise hosted collaboration service. At the same time, Microsoft will release for purchase the software products that make up Office 365—Office 2013 Professional, Exchange 2013, SharePoint 2013, and Lync 2013.
The Office 365 service was first released two years ago. It was an effort to stem the tide of Google Apps and other Web-hosted alternatives to Microsoft’s on-premises and privately hosted Exchange and SharePoint products. They were simplified versions of their perpetually licensed namesakes: designed to run in Microsoft’s Azure cloud service, based on the same core technology, but substantially different in terms of how they were managed and deployed.
Combined with Web versions of Office applications, Office 365 has been both more and less than its Google Apps competition. It blends perfectly with Microsoft’s desktop Office tools and even comes with Office 2013 Pro Plus licenses in its $20-a-month “Plan E3” form. But Office 365’s strengths are less impressive when you look at how it trails Google’s live collaboration and social features. For full disclosure, Ars is an Office 365 shop—but we use Google Docs, GTalk, and a number of other Google Apps tools to fill in gaps we perceive in Office 365.
That may change with the latest incarnation of Office 365 and the Exchange and SharePoint platforms. The differences between Microsoft’s hosted versions of Exchange and SharePoint and the on-premises counterparts have virtually disappeared. Office 365 has gained some real enterprise-strength management features like data loss prevention and e-discovery (at least in its premium plans). And the on-premises versions of the core of Office 365—Exchange Server 2013, SharePoint 2013, and Lync Server 2013 (which will be reviewed separately by Peter Bright)—have all been tweaked for better use in a virtualized world. Regardless of whether you buy a perpetual license and install Exchange and SharePoint on a server in your LAN closet or data center, set up a hosted mail service with a service provider, or subscribe to Office 365 Enterprise, you’ll have essentially the same set of administrative tools and the same user and administrative experience.
But perhaps most importantly, the latest versions of the Exchange and SharePoint platforms strike an important balance. The IT department has the power to tightly manage how information flows into, out of, and through an organization, but the platforms also give users the ability to wing it. The new Office 365, Exchange, and SharePoint allows users to collaborate socially, to build ad-hoc solutions, and to self-provision new features and applications through both public and private “app stores” (depending on how much leash the company wants to give them).
We set out to determine just how well the new service and servers strike this balance. We tested on a local installation of Exchange and SharePoint, then used an Office 365 implementation of the same services among Ars colleagues—as well as a known bad actor we’ll call Packetrat, who was out to break the rules.
Exchange 2013 and Exchange Online
There are a number of things Exchange 2013 changes from the user perspective, both for on-premise and in Office 2013. Even if you’re not using Outlook 2013 as your mail client, there are elements of Exchange that will change how you interact with your inbox—even how you think of an inbox.
Most of what users will notice is centered on what shows up in their mailboxes. Now, it’s not just mail. Exchange 2013 and Exchange Online offer more than shared folders and SharePoint integration; there’s a whole new model for in-mailbox applications hosted on the Exchange server.
Full Story: Review: Exchange and SharePoint 2013 ready for cloud—yours or Microsoft’s | Ars Technica.