Introduction 

• ‘The cloud’ is often seen as a big, scary and difficult to understand entirely. The aim of this piece is to explain why this isn’t the case by giving an overview of what Office 365 is and why it’s something you should consider adopting. I hope through explaining Office 365, including benefits, negatives and different uses for it, I’ll start to de-bunk some of the complexities of the cloud.
• Office 365 is the Microsoft cloud version of Office, which you pay a subscription for on either a monthly or annual basis, you basically rent the software. Microsoft Office 365 is compromised of all the normal things you’d expect from an Office Package, including; Outlook, Calendar,  Word Online, Excel Online, PowerPoint Online, OneNote Online & One Drive. It also covers  a number of other things which won’t be quite as common to a number of you, including; Tasks, Power BI, Delve, People, Sites, Projects & Yammer.
• I should highlight that I am a regular user of Office 365, as well as Office 2013 & Office 2016. At work I’d say I spend 60% of my time on Office 2013 and 40% on Office 365 and then at home I’m split pretty equally between Office 2016 & Office 365. This split at work does highlight there still isn’t 100% trust in Office 365 at an enterprise level just yet, but that is not really the focus of this piece.
• Now that I’ve covered what it is, in the rest of this piece I will cover; (1) Benefits of Office 365 (2) Negatives or drawbacks of Office 365 (3) Direct comparison between Office 365 and the latest non-cloud version of Office, I.e. Office 2016 (4) Some of the coolest features of Office 365, some of which I’ve used, but not all.

Benefits of Office 365 

• There are a number of benefits to moving away from your trusty CD-ROM version of Microsoft Office, here are the most important 7 to me;
• You get rid of the hassle of having to physically install the software – Simply pay online and away you go.
• No more time wasted patching and upgrading complex software systems – Never again will you have to update as bugs are discovered or update from Office 2013 to Office 2016, with Office 365 you always have the latest version of software & code.
• Low up front cost and predictable on-going costs – You can choose to pay a monthly subscription to Microsoft for use of Office 365, so you don’t have to pay 100% of the cost upfront.
• You have the latest and greatest upgrade – No longer do you have to feel jealous when a new version of Office comes out and you don’t have the time or money to upgrade, you’ll always have the latest version.
• Office 365 gives great flexibility across multiple machines – If you have multiple devices, or switch between a Mac and a PC then Office 365 is ideal. This is because even the consumer subscriptions cover all of these options.
• Your data is fully backed up and secure – You remove yourself as a single point of failure regarding backing up data and losing your laptop. Yes Microsoft aren’t flawless, but they have hundreds – if not thousands – of specialist individuals looking at ensuring all data is backed up and safely secured, much better than 30minutes of your time every 4 months!
• Using the software over the Internet — simply sign up and you’re ready to go. Without the cloud, a SharePoint deployment could take months.

Negatives of Office 365 

• As with everything else in life, not everything regarding Office 365 is perfect, I see 3 main negatives or drawbacks of moving to this cloud solution;
• Reliance on your network or bandwidth – traditionally with Office the only thing to consider was the quality of your tin (your desktop, laptop), however with cloud based software, you put extra pressure on your internet provider. Microsoft doesn’t control how you access the Internet (yet!), therefore, cannot stop internet outages or slow running connections.
• Your data is no longer in your hands – As you are on the cloud so is all your data, it’s hosted in Microsoft’s data centre. Again, there is absolutely an argument to say that Microsoft will want to do a much better job of looking after your data than you will, but some of you might not be comfortable losing the control.
• If your usage and needs are small Office 365 might be more expensive in the long term – Based on my cigarette packet maths if you don’t really care about the latest and greatest regarding updates and features then buying a traditional Office Package (Office 2013 or Office 2016) might be cheaper in the long term. Pay a one-off fee and then have that forever, whereas with Office 365 you have to continue paying to maintain your access. If you stop paying you stop being able to use the service.

Office 365 Vs Office 2016 

• Now that I’ve covered the overall positives and negatives of Office 365 I’ll compare it to the latest traditional Office Package, 2016.
• Price – Office 2016 costs you around £120 and you’ll have it for life, whereas Office 365 is ~£60 per year, meaning if you expect to keep your device for more than two years and don’t care about having the latest version of the software, the Office 2016 Package might be for you. But remember, with Office 365 you automatically get the latest features.
• Device Compatibility – Office 365 can go across all different types of devices (PC, MAC or tablet) with ease, whereas with Office 2016 you need a license for each.
• Device synchronisation – With Office 365 all elements of Outlook are synchronised across all devices, allowing you to access Office 365 from any PC, iPad or phone that you have installed the software on
• Upgrade Autonomy – If you are a bit of a control freak like me then you might not enjoy the automatic upgrades off Office 365, and traditional Office packages maintain your autonomy. Therefore if Microsoft have a shocker of an Office upgrade then you don’t automatically get stuck with it!
• It is also important to highlight that if you are reading this and considering upgrading from Office 2013 to Office 2016 or Office 365, then remember that mainstream support for Office 2013 doesn’t end until October 2018 making the jump to Office 2016 harder to justify.

Office 365 – Coolest Features I’ve used 

• There are some really cool features of Office 365, which I’ll touch on now. It’s worth noting that unless you have an Enterprise license you might not be able to use all of these.
• No more attachments! There is a great little trick for sharing files without having to send as attachments. All you need to do is upload the file to Office 365’s cloud storage, open Office 365 version of Outlook (I.e. Outlook Web App) then link to the file on your cloud storage instead of attaching the file. This is a huge saving on mailbox size.
• Use OneNote within Outlook – Integration of these two applications means you can convert to-do lists to tasks with reminders in calendar, helping you to better organise your calendar and never miss anything important from your day
• Real Time Multi-User Collaboration – As Office 365 is a cloud based service, multiple individuals can edit the same document at once (in multiple applications) and best of all you can see the edits being made and by whom live. No more having to send 15 versions of a document between 3 people over a 2 day period. You all just block out 1 hour in your diary and go through it all at once, a massive time saver!
• Auto Reformatting in Excel – Latest version in Office 365 has a feature called ‘Flash Fill’, this automatically recognises amendments being made and applies the same amendments to the rest of the document.
• Voice over IP (VoIP) telephony & Video Conferencing – With Skype for Business you not only get an instant messaging service but also VoIP & Video Conferencing. At an enterprise level this allows you to significantly reduce the cost of your physical telephony network/environment.

Office 365 – Coolest Features I’ve not used 

• As I highlighted at the start I don’t only use Office 365, I also use Office 2013 and 2016, therefore there are a few really cool features I haven’t gotten around to using yet, specifically;
• Add an Electronic Signature – Excellent free electronic signature app called ‘DocuSign’ which is available for Outlook. DocuSign allows you to do away with the wasted effort of printing documents, signing them and then either having to scan or fax them on, a huge time saver.
• Automatic Inbox De-Clutter – Another function for Outlook, this time it’s called ‘Clutter’ and uses the rules of your inbox to atomically de-clutter your inbox. You still have the safety of knowing that you can look through these ‘de-cluttered’ messages to ensure nothing has been wrongly removed.
• Automatic Image Suggestions – No more having to search for your own images with ‘Sway’, a cloud presentation software that is integrated with Bing image search. The Sway software will magically suggest images to you based on the written content you are using in Word, Excel or PowerPoint.

Conclusion 

• Cloud based software and solutions are becoming an ever bigger part of our technology landscape, and there is a lot of mis-placed concerns and worries about it’s impact. The aim of this piece has been to highlight the benefits of the cloud through a relatively easy to understand example, Office 365.
• I also hope that this post will help anyone currently unsure of which Office product to move to next. My main reservations of being reliant on a completely cloud based software is the additional relevance placed on your internet provider and also the fact that for low usage and requirement individuals it isn’t as cost effective. However, the advantages are considerable and I don’t think I would be as effective and productive at my job without Office 365.
• The future of the cloud has arrived and its presence is only going to grow, so start embracing it!

 

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