With Office 365, Microsoft is taking aim squarely at Google’s cloud-based business productivity suite, Google Apps for Business. Both sets of tools appeal to the small business market, and offer similar “work anywhere” cloud functionality and an ecosystem of related tools through their marketplaces. Despite Google having had a considerable head start in this market and having a much larger ecosystem of partner apps in its marketplace, Microsoft has the advantage of a strong brand in Office, a comparatively powerful of set of online tools in Office Web Apps, and a huge installed userbase for its desktop apps. Businesses that have already invested heavily in Microsoft products for the desktop will likely find the familiarity of Office 365 appealing, particularly as it offers the functionality of Sharepoint and Exchange for a low monthly subscription fee without requiring any upfront investment in hardware, software licenses or staff.

Office 365 includes:

• Office Web Apps. Online versions of Word, Excel, PowerPoint and OneNote.
• Sharepoint Online. Intranet and collaboration tools.
• Exhange Online. Email and calendars.
• Lync Online. Unified communications, including IM and web conferencing.

If you’d like to try it out, you can sign up for the beta at the Office 365 site for a 25-user account (for businesses with more than 25 users, Microsoft offers enterprise plans, including dedicated support). Note that Microsoft currently anticipates the average wait for a new account from sign-up as being approximately two to four weeks during the beta period. When the beta ends, which is likely to happen later this year, users will have 30 days to decide whether to migrate to paid subscription, which should start at $6 per user per month. For comparison, Google charges $50 per user per year for Google Apps for Business, or around $4 per month.

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So is Microsoft Online Services a viable option for web workers? As the UK is now included in the list of countries it’s available in, and there is a 30-day free trial, I thought I’d take it for a spin and see.

Online Services offers access to a range of products. The Business Productivity Online Suite is basically a hosted version of Exchange Server, SharePoint Server and Live Meeting, available for a subscription fee of £10 ($14) per user, per month in the UK.

The collaborative features of SharePoint and Live Meeting, in particular, are very good and might be handy for web workers with distributed teams, especially if your team members are used to using Microsoft products. However, the upfront costs of the standalone products — running into the thousands — are hugely off-putting for any small business or independent web worker, so a monthly subscription is attractive.

The first step is to get signed up with an administrator account. The experience here could be better. Rather than simple registration, you have to jump through numerous hoops. Particularly annoying is the compulsory password reset. Be prepared for a lot of form-filling and jumping from screen to screen.

Once you’ve managed to get signed up, you’ll find Online Services fairly easy to use, especially if you’ve used any of the standalone products before. Administration of user accounts is straightforward, and setting up a new site collection in SharePoint is simple. However, I found the admin experience to be quite sluggish, with some frustrating delays.

Online Services administration

Once your users are set up, email, calendaring and contacts become available, either though Outlook or Outlook Web Access, and they can start working with any SharePoint site collections that you have set up. Microsoft recommends each user downloading a special Sign-In tool, as without it you’ll have to keep re-entering your username and password.

From a users’ point of view, the apps served by Online Services run reasonably fast — the delays that I experienced as an administrator were not evident while using Outlook Web Access, for example.

Outlook Web Access

SharePoint is an excellent browser-based collaboration tool, and it works well when served by Online Services. You can use it to run an entire intranet, including wikis, blogs, messaging, event calendars and shared document repositories. It’s a very powerful and flexible solution, and, again, seemed reasonably fast in my test.

SharePoint

If you’re looking for a collaboration solution for your distributed team, you might like to check out Online Services, particularly if your team members are used to working with SharePoint or you have a client who’s looking for Microsoft solutions. The cost is not prohibitive, it’s quite easy to use and the services work well.

However, for smaller companies and teams, Online Services is probably overkill, and there are plenty of other services that provide similar functionality — Google Apps for domains and Zoho, for example — that might be cheaper or more suitable.

Would you use Online Services?

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Today, we offer The Website is Down‘s dramatization of that most epic of clashes — the sales guy versus the web dude. Told from the perspective of the Web Guy’s monitor, this breakdown of office relations will seem all too familiar to those on either side of the screen.

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With their free service, you can:

• Have a personal calendar, tasks list, contacts, reminders, journal
• Have 100MB of free storage
• Sync with your mobile device
• Automatically fetch emails from other accounts

The syncing happiness begins with setting up your Mail2Web Live account and configuring your devices.  If you have a Windows Mobile device, this will involve configuring ActiveSync to work with your Mail2Web service.

Alternatively, if you have a BlackBerry device, you can use the included Exchange support and Palm users can utilize VersaMail.  The ActiveSync settings are shown in the following screenshot:

There are similar solutions out there for Google Mail and other platforms, but Mail2Web Live is perfect for someone who has multiple devices to keep in sync, has a preference for Microsoft Exchange, and may already have ActiveSync on their device.

If you are seeking other hosted Exchange servers, check out web hosts who offer very inexpensive options such as RackSpace, 1and1, and WebHost4Life.

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In conclusion, time is wasted arranging meetings because they involve multiple email transactions and/or phone calls.

A newcomer to the meeting coordinating scene, Tungle is an add-on application that tries to take some of the frustration out of arranging meetings.

The Tungle Client

Tungle is a downloadable application that looks very much like an IM program. The application reads your calendar and shares your availability with your Tungle peers. One benefit of Tungle is that it doesn’t change or alter your Exchange calendar, just reads it for the purpose of allowing you to share your free/busy data. Tungle also allows you to see your contact’s free/busy data within Outlook, sans having to fire up the Tungle client.

At this point in time, Tungle only supports Microsoft Outlook (with or without an exchange server) on Windows Vista and XP.

Interoperability

If you want to schedule a meeting with someone who you know doesn’t have Outlook or Exchange, you can create a Tungle Space. A Tungle Space is simply a temporary web site to arrange a particular meeting. In the Spaces tab, you’ll see a grid representing the coming days. You click a zone that represents times that you’re free. An email is sent to those who you invite and they get a link to your Tungle space where they’re able to see your open times. The invitees select a block of time and the meeting is then booked.

When I asked Tungle CEO Marc Gringas about future plans to support other calendaring platforms such as Apple’s iCal and Google Calendar, he replied by stating these are the next two platforms are the next to be launched, with the same functionality as the Windows client.

Monetization

When asked about how they are going to monetize Tungle, Gringas said the basic client will always remain free. However they will eventually introduced premium services that will be billed monthly or yearly. Premium features will likely include detailed calendar information (rather than just free/busy data) and the ability to schedule meeting resources such as projectors, food, microphones, etc.

Conclusion

Tungle is an easy to use application that takes some of the trouble of scheduling meetings. However, until other calendaring applications are supported, I cannot see recommending this product for your scheduling needs. Those on Outlook 2007 already have the ability to share their free/busy data with those not on their Exchange system via the Internet Free/Busy functionality. There’s no reason to install and configure a third-party application when Outlook 2007 supports this out of the box.

Tungle’s true value will be realized when it serves as a cross-platform calendar scheduling system; bridging the gap between not only Outlook users across enterprises, but across operating systems and other calendaring platforms.

Tungle advertises that no data is kept on any central servers. Gringas, in our interview, told me Tungle works in a P2P fashion, similar to Skype. When I addressed the issue of privacy, I asked him if scheduling data is sent over the wire in clear-text. He responded by saying the beta build I was using did use clear-text but upon release, they’ll be employing encryption (off the top of his head, he thought it was Blowfish). I feel a bit uneasy about any type of clear-text communication of my data, so it I hope this encryption promise manifests.

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