Office 365 And SkyDrive - Help!

[AndyCan]

I'm working in a small business (45 users/machines) i used to work in a high which is why i still rely on this place for such good advice. It's important to say that we are running on a workgroup currently so i want to limit the amount of logins user's have to perform in order to access their files and email etc.

 

What i want to achieve is to get everyone onto Office 365 using email, office apps and personal cloud based storage. I've never used SharePoint so get a little confused(scared) whenever it's brought up.

 

Want i want in workspace is a simple allocation of space for users to save and open documents. I played with SkyDrive and it works well, having the local folder to browse through and also logging into live to browse your files there if not at your computer. Now i was told SkyDrive is not included with Office 365 and instead SharePoint is but from when i tried it a while back i thought that with Sharepoint i couldnt create simple directory structures and also have a local file on my computer which is synced back and forward. I'm now reading about SkyDrive Pro. Is this now included in Office 365 or soon to be? And will it do what it is i'm wanting to achieve?

 

I also then have shared drives, how would someone suggest i go about setting them up with Office 365 so that i can still control who does and doesn't have access to them.

 

I was looking at Office 365 Enterprise so that i could have desktop versions of MS Office installed. For some reason im worried about web based versions maybe not being as powerful, not being able to access them if the internet goes down or being slow and sluggish. Also im not sure if the Outlook desktop alerts would work in the web app for it but i should probably just test these myself but any insight into how rugged and durable they are under heavy use would be appreciated.

 

I just need some help as the whole Office 365 thing is confusing me especially when im not sure if features such as SkyDrive Pro are or are not currently included, argh!

[gshaw]

The current Office 365 interface is awful for personal document storage imo, the new version that's in preview at the moment is 10x better. Personal Sharepoint = SkyDrive Pro in the new release and that syncs to your PC as you want.

 

It's all bundled around Office 2013 and should work really well, check out my blog as I've got a post about the Preview release that might help

[AndyCan]

Yeah i think your blog post was what i noticed that made it look a lot more feasible to me.

 

Do you know when the expected release date is for the new version that is currently in preview?

[EduTech]

Yeah i think your blog post was what i noticed that made it look a lot more feasible to me.

 

Do you know when the expected release date is for the new version that is currently in preview?

 

I think it should be around Q1 of next year but don't believe a date has been confirmed yet.

 

James.