Office 365 - interval vs external cloud

[R06]

Hello all

 

We are thinking of deploying Office 365. So I would be grateful for some feedback from you all on the following:

 

- Are the major selling points of Office 365 (1) the cloud based availability of Office files and (2) collaboration (via OneNote)? Anything else?

- Advantages/disadvantages of hosting the cloud internally using Sharepoint vs subscription to a Microsoft cloud?

- Can Office 365 clients sit alongside Office 2010 on Windows 7? I'm thinking of having both versions installed on the computers simultaneously - this will ease the pressure of a major deployment effort.

- Is Office 365 different from Office 2010 to warrant additional training?

 

Many thanks.

[Zoom7000]

I think you may be a bit mistaken here. Office 365 is a monthly/yearly based subscription model for licensing Office as opposed to buying the license outright from a retailer or volume license program.

 

Office 365 will allow you to download the latest copy of Office (2013 as of writing) to your PC and will always allow you to install the latest version at the time of a valid subscription. As opposed to buying Office outright or via Select VL which only allows you to install the purchased version of Office, but there is no subscription. As a benefit to subscribing to Office 365, you will get some additional features like increased OneDrive storage, free Skype minutes etc.

 

I'm presuming you are thinking of Office 365 for Education since you are posting here. In which case, you will also get the option of running Exchange and SharePoint in the cloud, as opposed to having to need a server onsite. You can find more details of what you can get from Office 365 for Education here.

 

(Off Topic: Woo Hoo! Post number 1000!)

Edited January 13, 2015 by Zoom7000

[JRowley]

Ok I think some clarification is required.

 

Office 365 is the online platform which basically includes Online Office Web Clients, OneDrive, Sharepoint, Exchange, Lync. What exactly you get depends on your Office 365 subscription.

Office 2013 is the most recent version of Office and can be used standalone, or attached to an Office 365 account.

 

You can use Office 365 without Office 2013, and can use Office 2013 without Office 365. It sounds more like you are asking "Can Office 2013 work alongside Office 2010", the answer to this is mostly. However there is an issue with Outlook which would probably make you prefer to have one or the other, not both on the same machine.

 

You could probably switch to Office 2013 without a major retraining effort, perhaps a small heads up on some of the menu changes but nothing too extreme I would have thought. Personally however we are looking to skip Office 2013 and wait for the next major release. If you are going to use the Office 365 web stuff then you will almost certainly need to run courses.