Office 365 offers value, but it’s not Office

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	TOP STORY[/size][/font] Office 365 offers value, but it’s not Office[/size]
	By Woody Leonhard Trick question: when is Office not Office? When it’s Office 365, of course. On Monday, Microsoft revealed its latest beta version of Office 365. For some small businesses — even some individuals — it may be worth the price.[/size]

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The full text of this column is posted at WindowsSecrets.com/2011/04/28/01 (opens in a new window/tab).

Columnists typically cannot reply to comments here, but do incorporate the best tips into future columns.[/td]

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Trick question: when is Office not Office? When it’s Open Office.org 🙂

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People who should not even be able to own a computer have bought into the Microsoft hoodwinking tactics and the rest of us are paying for it.

However my hat is off to Microsoft’s marketing and making themselves the big bucks. After all Microsoft is a business, has nothing to do with creating effective software, it’s just a business.

Open Office blows Microsoft away, penny for penny.

17,000,000 businesses in the United States are non-employee businesses, meaning, 1-person enterprises. Why would they want Office that isn’t Office!?! So their texting can show up in their email!?! Duh! Who uses Outlook anyway!?! Those who don’t have any knowledge of the land of computer.

I guess it just takes most people longer to learn than others.

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Who uses Outlook anyway!?! Those who don’t have any knowledge of the land of computer.

I guess it just takes most people longer to learn than others.

I use Outlook 2007, and I’ve been an IT professional for almost 30 years, much of that time doing desktop support in a large corporate setting.

I get a good price on it through my job; I couldn’t afford it otherwise. But I happen to like it.

I guess it’s just going to take me a while longer to learn, eh?

Cheers, mate!

Group "L" (Linux Mint)
with Windows 10 running in a remote session on my file server

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Trick question: when is Office not Office? When it’s Open Office.org 🙂

Or, the truly open-source version, LibreOffice, which is what I use on all my laptops.

-- rc primak

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@Bob –

Glad you caught that. I’m surprised how people don’t understand what’s happened to OpenOffice in the past few months. Think I’ll write about it…

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surely this is just MS playing catchup with Google Apps which does everything that Open 365 does but for less

Duh! Who uses Outlook anyway!?!

sadly – some of us – as we have plugins to connect with incoming mail to our database (which is cloud based!)

If I could ditch MS I would but sadly many business applications – not one in our line of biz for example – don’t operate on an alternative OS, or non-Office apps.

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If you think this is just Microsoft catching up with Google apps or OpenOffice or LibreOffice, you really need to read in depth about what Office 365 contains. You must not have any idea about Exchange server, SharePoint, or Lync and their capabilities. Think about what Microsoft is probably doing to position itself for the future. At a certain subscription level you get a license for the desktop Office applications. At all subscription levels you get the Office web apps which are admittedly a somewhat weak first release. But Microsoft knows how to improve software over time. It is likely that the Office desktop apps and the Office web apps will converge over time with some combination of free & pay. This is just the next step from Microsoft along a path that will take quite a while to see the final outcome.

If you choose to use open source software that is fine. Just don’t try to say it is on par with Office.

Joe

--Joe

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@Joe –

Agreed completely. Office 365 has almost nothing in common with Google Apps. I had hoped to dispel that notion with this article!

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Hi, I’m reading your articles on Office 2013 / Office 365 and find them very helpful. I did run into a broken link for the Office 365 Fact Sheet mentioned just above the section labeled: What you can do better with Office 365…

The mentioned fact sheet is available at:
http://download.microsoft.com/download/3/1/C/31C25106-8C99-4B1E-8D24-EC8DE2EFB18D/Office365FactSheet.docx

Thanks,

Don

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