This is the last in my series of “Migrating to Office 365” posts
- Migrating to Office 365: Why?
- Migrating to Office 365: Exchange & Outlook
- Migrating to Office 365: OneDrive and OneNote
- Migrating to Office 365: Why I Chose Microsoft Surface
There were quite a few problems…
There have clearly been plenty of niggles with the process, and I had to do a LOT of digging and fiddling to find the solutions to some of these problems. It’s been frustrating and challenging.
There will be those who see this as evidence that Office 365 is a load of junk, not ready for market, and another example of Microsoft not respecting its customers. These are all fair points.
One last scare – transferring to paid licenses…
Originally I signed up for a free trial of “Office 265 Small Business Premium”, which gives licenses for 10 users. Once I’d decided to buy an Office 365 license it was very easy to go in to the license manager an pay by credit card, and the license manager updated from showing “1/10″ licenses used” to “1/11” – so I could see the license had been added. There was no way to directly assign the new paid license to a user however, and Microsoft kept sending automated “buy now to avoid data loss” messages” which were a bit scary. After logging a ticket, I got a phone call from a real and knowledgeable person in support (wow) to reassure me that licenses are reallocated automatically, so as long as I had enough paid licenses for the all the users I had set up, these would be used automatically when the trial ended.
It’s not for everyone
If you hate Microsoft, or just everything corporate, run for the hills.
Office 365 is a Microsoft Office product. If you’re not an existing Microsoft Office user, it’s probably not for you.
If you don’t need both online and offline access to mail and files , it’s probably more hassle than its worth. (just either use conventional applications OR online tools)
If you’re not at all IT literate, approach with a wee bit of caution. There’s stuff that could catch you out.
BUT – I love it!
If you are a reasonably IT Literate Microsoft Office user it’s BRILLIANT
I can now access my files, e-mails, contacts and calendar anywhere, anytime on any device. Once set up, it’s seamless.
I am freed of my dependency on my one laptop with everything installed – I don’t need to carry it everywhere and if it breaks I’m not totally stuffed until I fix it. I am freed of third-party sync tools, conflicts between the way Google and Microsoft interpret contacts fields and manually copying files between devices.
I love it, and I hope these blogs will help anyone else who decides to give it a go enter into it well informed and deal with some of the problems they may encounter.
