Is Migration from Office Live to Office 365 the Right Choice?
Office live has served the small business community extremely well with its simple and easy to use website and communication tools designed for convenience at an extremely attractive price of zero dollars. With just days left for Office Live Small Business (OLSB) services to be shut down, many customers are wondering if migration to Microsoft Office 365 is the right choice. The transition involves a whole set of challenges that small businesses are not ready for and more importantly do not have the time or bandwidth to undertake. Though Microsoft has provided steps and transition guide small business users are having a hard time understanding and executing them
For those who are at crossroads and deciding whether they should migrate to Microsoft Office 365 or look out for another service, Microsoft created an article in the community site that will help you to take a decision.
Below are some pointers that business should be aware of before taking a decision on migrating to Office 365
- Office 365 is not free forever. After the trial period of 6 months, the charges are $6 per user per month plus the additional domain cost per year.
- Your domain will not be hosted with Office 365 it has to be hosted with the default OLSB hosting provider Melbourne IT or another domain hosting provider such as GoDaddy
- Office 365 website designer does not include all the features of Office Live website designer. Form designer, blog module, analytics are some of the features that are missing.
- There is alternate website hosting providers that are worth taking a look at.
As Small Business solution specialist and Microsoft Cloud Accelerate partner our suggestion to these customers is that if you are looking at more than just website and want to improve your productivity and collaboration tools then Office 365 is the right choice for you. Below are some of the highlights of Office 365 when compared with OLSB
- Email services in Office 365 are provided by Exchange Server 2010 an enterprise leading email service
- You Get 25 GB of space per mailbox with enterprise anti-spam and antivirus protection
- No Advertisements which means you stay focused
- Outlook Web App a rich web-based version of Microsoft Outlook
- Office Web Apps to access MS Office documents from a browser
- Multiple email aliases per user
- You can design your website using Sharepoint Designer 2010 a free tool from Microsoft
- Complete synchronization of your emails, outlook folders, contacts and calendars on your mobile devices like iPhone, Android, Windows Phones
Apart from the above features Office 365 also provides you with
Sharepoint Online: For sharing and managing all your documents and information
Lync Online: For Instant Messaging, Audio and video conferencing and screen sharing. You don’t have to have goto meeting or webex accounts.
OLSB customers have 6 months of the free trial period during which they can evaluate Office 365 and then decide if it is a correct fit for their business.
IOTAP a Microsoft preferred transition partner from Office Live Small Business to Office 365 has been helping a lot of small business understand the value provided by Office 365 and perform a seamless migration from OLSB to office 365. Visit our Office Live to Office 365 migration page to know more about our services.