Office 365

I’ve bought Office 365 Small Business Premium license as soon as it was possible, so on March 16th. And I simply love it. Let me just mention that transfer was really smooth. I haven’t done a thing. Then I’ve just bought new license, switched it for my account and cancelled my old plan. So easy. I had to reconfigure nothing. Well, I’ve uninstalled Office 2013 from my computer and installed it from scratch as I was using preview version of Home Suite, so wasn’t sure if transfer would be possible and clean. Anyway, it took just few minutes. Nothing like with older office which needed quite some time for the installation to complete.

Microsoft is retiring Messenger which would be replaced by Skype. I have nothing against, one client less to stay in touch with everybody. But I wonder if then Lync would be able to connect with Skype users. Right now Lync has ability to connect with Messenger users which are outside of our organization. Sometimes it doesn’t work as I’ve described here, but in general it’s nice functionality. If Lync would be able to communicate with Skype then I would definitely be happy.

Many domain registrars (or at least the ones I’m using) don’t provide domain hosting. So you’re unable to create any records for your domain, you can just change name servers for it. In most cases it’s fine as most of hosting providers gives ability to manage DNS records, so you just need to update name servers in your registrar control panel.

Sometimes however it’s not enough. For instance if you want to use your domain in Office 365 you need first verify that it’s yours. In order to do so you need to create TXT or MX record with value provided by O365 setup process. Of course if your registrar doesn’t offer domain hosting you’re unable to do so.

As LifeHacker hasn’t published my comment, I’m still waiting for verification email to arrive, I’ve decided to write this post. I must admit that I’m a little angry after reading article comparing Office 365 with Google Apps. Actually only one paragraph made me mad, so I would quote it here entirely before I would get to the point:

User Experience
Google Apps v. Office 365 Feature Showdown: Which Should You Use?The way the user interacts with the application suite may be the biggest difference between Google Apps and Office 365. When you use Google Apps, you live in your Web browser. You edit documents and spreadsheets in Google Docs through your browser, you get your email through Gmail, and you chat with colleagues using Google Talk – all in your browser.

Since yesterday I’m a happy subscriber of Office 365 P1 plan. I now have 25 GB Exchange mailbox (using only 0,5 GB), Lync IM (awesome), Sharepoint site (quite useless), and access to Office web apps (which are free anyway). As I’m “half American” I was able to buy it for only 6,38 USD, which is a little less than what I was paying Apps4Rent (6,95). I’m pretty happy with the service, setup went smooth. I was even able to trick O365 a little, so my domain is still managed by my main hosting service, but I have all records as they should be. If you have your domain elsewhere and want to keep it there, but you want to use it for O365 services do as follows:

I’m subscribing Technet Magazine (both US and Polish) and recently I’ve read that Office 365 is planned to be available for single user (well one person company). It was good news for me as I’m currently using Hosted Exchange from third party provider and I would really want to switch to Microsoft Exchange Online (which currently is offered to minimum 5 users). But in the same post there was written that 5 user minimum would still be valid, so I was confused. As I’m reading blog of Mariusz Kedziora and he happens to be editor of Polish Technet Magazine I’ve written to him with request to clarify it a little. His response was that 5 user minimum would stay and he wanted me to point him to paragraph where I’ve read about single user. I’ve sent him excerpt and lost any hope as he was not replying. But today I’ve received email from Marcin Górny (Advocacy Specialist - whatever that means) and he confirmed that indeed there is a plan to introduce single user version, but currently he can’t share any more information.