Cloud. Office365. Cloud. Office365. Cloud…. Hosted this, hosted that.

The only hosting I want to do is host a Super Bowl party! Is everybody a little tired of all this cloud talk? Well, get used to it. The cloud is here to stay. The cliché might be overused, but “resistance is futile”. So what do we do, how do we do it and who do we do it with? Well I’ve don’t the research and I’ve made my decision. The Microsoft Office365 is simply head and shoulders above the rest. Now before anybody starts accusing me of following the big bad empire, I have my reasons.

1. Office365 has grown up. What an improvement over the clunky and cumbersome Business Productivity Online Suite (BPOS). The administration portal is very easy to use.
2. Cost. Simply put it is among the lowest cost Hosted Solution out there.
3. Mobile Phone integration. With BES now out in BETA and soon to be officially released, Office365 works with all mobile phones
4. Feature Rich. Combining Exchange, Sharepoint and Lync into a single system makes for an amazing feature set that can really benefit businesses.
5. The Hybrid Model. For clients with an internal domain, Office365 includes Active Directory synchronization

But there are detractors. Often when I discuss Office365 to my clients they say “Yeah but what about reliability and security”. Putting your data on the cloud definitely puts the fear of Voldemort into the minds of business owners. But to that I ask you, the business owner, this – what is your budget on setting up an exchange server and keeping it operational and secure? Is it $100/month? $500/month? $1000/month? Did you know that Microsoft spends $1 Googol per year on redundancy and security. Now that is ironic! Okay it’s not quite that much, but it is definitely far more than any single business can possibly spend. It’s simple economies of scale. Microsoft is so confident in their reliability that you can logon and see the server health during the past 7 days. You can even get this information via an RSS feed. Ask your IT provider for that information and you’ll get the old “cheque is in the mail” response.

Ready to give it a try: CLICK HERE to get a free trial. If you need any assistance, please do not hesitate to give us a call. We’ll happily walk you through the entire setup process.