Office 365 is not Microsoft’s first attempt at offering this kind of service; it has previously offered hosted Exchange and SharePoint services with BPOS (Business Productivity Online Services). But by including Office Web Apps in Office 365, the company now has a much more rounded product that enables users to do their work anywhere, on any device, and to easily collaborate with others.

Office 365 vs. Google Apps for Business

One of Office 365′s main advantages over Google Apps is the huge existing installed user base of Office products. Office is entrenched in the majority of businesses worldwide, and Office 365 offers an easy pathway for those users to migrate to cloud collaboration while using familiar tools. Office 365 also has a greater range of features than Google Apps, incorporating office productivity (Office and Office Web Apps), collaboration and intranet tools (SharePoint Online), email and calendars (Exchange Online) and instant messaging and web conferencing (Lync Online).

Unlike some previous Microsoft releases, Office 365 works cross-platform, so it can be accessed equally via Mac and PC and on mobile devices — although there are reports that mobile access from some devices is limited. Office Web Apps, in particular, is an impressive suite of products, and while they aren’t complete cloud-based replacements for the desktop Office apps — they don’t offer the full range of functionality that desktop apps do — Microsoft obviously invested a lot of effort in making the user experience very similar. The interface is familiar, and documents look identical in Office Web Apps and in the desktop applications. By enabling seamless round-trip working between Office Web Apps and Office desktop applications, Office 365 can also work when users are offline, something that can’t be said of Google Apps.

Of course, Google believes that its product is superior. On Monday, in a post titled “365 reasons to consider Google Apps” on the official Google Enterprise blog, Google Apps Product Manager Shan Sinha aimed a few barbs at Office 365, saying that it is designed for usage by individuals, not by teams; that its pricing is complex; and that Office 365 doesn’t have proven cloud reliability, while Google Apps has a record of 99.9 percent uptime. Some of Sinha’s points are debatable: Office 365 does enable co-editing and collaboration, for example, and Microsoft has plenty of experience in offering cloud-based services, even if Office 365 itself is new.

Easy migration to cloud productivity for existing Office users

With its higher price point, Office 365 might not tempt existing corporate users of Google Apps for Business away, particularly as migrating between the two services is unlikely to be straightforward. However, that’s probably not the market that Microsoft is aiming at. Rather, it wants to keep hold of the huge numbers of business customers with existing investments in the Office product line. For them, Office 365 is a well-designed product that offers an easy migration route to cloud-based office productivity at a reasonable price point with products that will feel very familiar to their users. I think that will make Office 365 a compelling proposition for many business customers, in particular smaller businesses that would like to offer their employees the ability to work and collaborate remotely using familiar Microsoft tools but don’t want to have to make an upfront investment in, and then maintain, their own SharePoint and Exchange servers.

Office 365 is available on a number of different plans, starting at around $6 per user per month for small businesses with less than 25 users; enterprise customers have access to plans including dedicated support. For comparison, Google Apps for Business costs around $4 per month.

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• The Future of Work Platforms: An Overview

Harmon.ie provides an interface for Microsoft SharePoint directly within Outlook. It simplifies collaboration and document version control by letting users send live links to SharePoint documents, rather than emailing individual docs that are hard to manage. Users can edit, rate, or tag documents, and see and manage previous versions, all directly inside Outlook. According to the developers, enterprises that have large investments in SharePoint have found that using Harmon.ie has increased end-user SharePoint adoption from 30 percent to as high as 80 percent..

Harmon.ie 3.0, being released Tuesday in beta, adds social features that recognize that collaboration is about people as much as documents. The new “people” tab in the Harmon.ie sidebar lets users see colleagues’ profiles and availability. Presence notifications are geared toward work environments, since they can be used to show what project or document an individual is working on. The people tab also displays a multi-threaded activity stream, and lets workers call, chat or video conference using Microsoft Lync/OCS, Lotus Sametime or Cisco UC.

Harmon.ie 3.0 also simplifies the creation of ad-hoc groups centered around a specific task. The “suggested colleagues” feature recommends possible group members based on the frequency of interaction (by email, chat or voice) and by whether they have co-authored or co-edited documents in the past.

Since Simon wrote about Harmon.ie a few months ago, several other apps have added some similar features to the email interface, for the simple reason that many workers in the enterprise spend a lot of their time there. Xobni, for example, offers “gadgets” for such enterprise collaboration tools as SharePoint, and several services, notably Rapportive and Gist, provide social connections directly from the email interface. And for organizations that don’t use SharePoint, Egnyte recently announced tools for file-sharing within Outlook.

Harmon.ie 3.0 is currently available in beta. The free version includes the SharePoint interface, but does not include the social features. The enterprise version of the software, which includes the social components, is priced at $125 per user, or on a subscription basis for $50 per user per year. In addition to the SharePoint version, the developer also offers a version for Lotus Notes, and another for Google Docs, although the latter does not currently include social features.

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• The Future of Work Platforms: An Overview
• The Future of Workplaces

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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• The Future of Work Platforms: An Overview

• Test SharePoint via remote access. Since your SharePoint implementation is sitting inside your firewall it is important to test typical SharePoint tasks like accessing document libraries through your remote access solution prior to turning your teleworkers loose. Access issues will only make teleworkers bypass the platform.
• Make SharePoint more social. With a product as customizable as Microsoft SharePoint, you can deploy it in any number of configurations. Unfortunately, these many choices may also mean many SharePoint sites go online with practically no frills. Starting with SharePoint 2007, you can incorporate social media options including blogs, wikis, and RSS feeds into your SharePoint sites. Launching these social media tools can help foster collaboration and ensure your SharePoint site is a focal point for project and communications activities.
• Factor SharePoint into your telework processes. I’ve been working with SharePoint off and on since its inception and seen implementations inside organizations large and small. Two common mistakes I see are SharePoint sites that are too locked down and no better than static web pages, and SharePoint sites that are implemented without input from the project teams or the business side of the organization. When creating your telework pilot plan, factor SharePoint into business processes and communications. Follow up with appropriate documentation and training for your teleworkers.
• Develop a SharePoint test site. If SharePoint is currently underutilized in your organization, then perhaps your teleworkers can help you recoup your investment by developing a SharePoint test site. Developing a test site during your telework pilot progrtam, you can discover which SharePoint features are required and how it is best used.
• Consider a hosted SharePoint solution. There might be technical, budgetary, or logistical reasons for not opening up your SharePoint site to remote access. So if SharePoint is already familiar to your teleworkers and you are looking to take advantage of SharePoint/Microsoft Office integration you may want to consider a third-party host for your SharePoint sites. Microsoft and a number of its hosting partners offer SharePoint on a monthly subscription basis.

How are the teleworkers in your organization using Microsoft SharePoint? Share your tips below.

Related GigaOM Pro content (sub. req.): Report: The Real-Time Enterprise

While many may consider SharePoint to be not exactly “Mac friendly” just yet, this is definitely a step in the right direction.

The Mac user must first be set up with access to the SharePoint site or Office Live Workspace by the local admin or site owner. They must also be running the latest updates to Microsoft Office 2008. Now, Microsoft Word, PowerPoint and Excel all include the “Open from Document Connection” feature, accessible from the File menu.

Access from Microsoft Office for the First Time

From the File menu, choose “Open from Document Connection.” The “Document Connection” dialog box appears for the first time. The following illustration shows no document connections have been setup.

From here, you can set up your document connections. For this post, I am going to connect to an Office Live Workspace,  but the steps to connect to a SharePoint site are nearly identical. Choose “Add Location,” and then “Sign in to an Office Live Workspace.”  An authentication dialog box appears:

Once you log in, the Office Live Work Space or SharePoint site file library appears:

Once you’ve opened the document connection, you have the following options:

• Add Location. You can access multiple locations from an open connection. Accessible locations for you then appear on the left side of the dialog.
• Add File. With the Add File option, you can upload additional files from your Mac’s local hard drive or other accessible file location.
• Edit. The Edit option opens the selected file in its native application.
• Read. The Read option enables you to read the selected file in its native application.

If you are logged into a SharePoint site, you’ll have options to Upload, Check Out, Check In, and Discard files.

Working On the Mac in a Microsoft Windows World

The addition of the Open Document Connection feature may not satisfy every Mac-using web worker who has to access files from an Office Live Workspace or SharePoint site, but at least now, Mac-using web workers aren’t quite as shut out as they once might have been.

Have you tried accessing SharePoint or Office Live Workspaces using Office 2008 Mac? Share your experiences below.

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• The Future of Work Platforms: An Overview
• Report: Evolution of The Private Cloud

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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• The Future of Work Platforms: An Overview

37Signals’ BaseCamp, covered before, provides a popular web-based product tool, but what if you’re a team or workgroup who is looking for something a little more robust?

Jive Software has released version 2.0 of their Clearspace product. Clearspace differs from other product offerings by focusing their product on the people who will be utilizing the collaboration tool.  Unlike Microsoft SharePoint, which focuses on documents, ClearSpace wants to ensure user adoption by adapting many of the Web 2.0 strategies used by FaceBook, MySpace, and other social networking sites into the enterprise environment.

Bring Social into Work Collaboration

Users who log in to Clearspace will first see their personalized home page.  Dubbed “iGoogle for your work life,” this web page is a widgetized window into your working world.  You can customize your activity streams and you can see recent activity on users by hovering over their name.  Presence indicators allow you to see the person’s availability for an IM conversation.

The startpage shows you status of all your projects, to-do lists, and related information. You can update your status, similar to Facebook.  For example, you could state, “Jason is unit testing his code for the calendar widget”.  You can also set announcements, use polls, and see tag clouds for Clearspace content.  Check out the video below, courtesy of Dennis Howlett’s review of Clearspace 2.0.

Getting Work Done

Clearspace wants to be the hub of your project management.  With their management utilities, you can create project calendars, milestones, assign tasks, discuss project status, and upload documents.  Using their customizable interface, you can drag projects you want to keep an eye onto your homepage and keep tabs on the project via RSS feeds.

As a unique feature, Clearspace allows you to collaborate on documents with people outside your corporate firewall, similar to the functionality in Google Docs.  Clearspace can also search and interact with data within Microsoft SharePoint.

The Competition is Stiff

Microsoft SharePoint is a leader in enterprise collaboration. As a SharePoint user and proponent in my day job, I’m familiar with its shortcomings. SharePoint has features such as shared calendars, task lists, document libraries and a few collaborative web tools such as blogs, wikis, and message boards.  However each component is shut off from the others, making the creation of a cohesive project website tedious.  SharePoint requires a high degree of trial and error and end-user training.  With SharePoint, Microsoft has  focused on function over user-friendliness.

Jive seems to have heard the battle cries of disgruntled employees who want to effectively collaborate with their teammates and co-workers. Clearspace, with its streamlined UI and usability, helps individuals and teams create intranets that blend attractive aesthetics and functional project sites.

Conclusion

Clearspace’s focus on giving its users the ability to set up a workspace and presenting the information that is of interest to them is a strategic advantage. FaceBook calls itself a social utility to keep you in touch with the people around you. Clearspace has taken strides to be the work utility to keep you in touch with the projects and co-workers who you depend on day-to-day to help you get your work done.

There are two purchasing options for Clearspace, a hosted model and a licensed/self-hosted model. The Licensed model sits behind your company’s firewall and is priced at $5 per user per month. For more information on hosted model pricing, see Jive’s website.

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• The Future of Work Platforms: An Overview

Windows Live SkyDrive will allow you have up to 5GB of online storage and Office Live Workspace serves as your personal collaboration space on the web.  We’ll elaborate on both both these services.

Windows Live SkyDrive was recently bumped to 5GB from 1GB of online storage for its users.  SkyDrive is plainly a storage area on the web. Think of it as your own locker for you to keep files on.  The online storage space was thought to be a more contested market.  Google has been rumored to be offering a Gdrive (the user-created name for their online storage space).

SkyDrive recently lost its Beta status and also added support for many new countries including Argentina, Australia, Austria, Belgium, Bolivia, Brazil, Canada, Chile,
Colombia, Denmark, the Dominican Republic, Ecuador, El Salvador,
Finland, France, Guatemala, Honduras, Italy, Japan, Mexico, the
Netherlands, New Zealand, Nicaragua, Norway, Panama, Paraguay, Peru,
Puerto Rico, Portugal, South Korea, Spain, Sweden, Switzerland, Taiwan,
and Turkey.

Office Live Workspace offers more collaboration surrounding documents and workspaces.  Think of Office Live Workspace as a miniature, personal version of SharePoint.  You can simply share office documents or alternatively, click “Create A Workspace” and build either: Project Workspace, School Workspace, Sports Team Workspace, and so on.  Each workspace type has specific site features for that audience.  For example the Meeting workspace will facilitate a attendee list, meeting notes, minutes archive, and a to-do list.

These tools can add some much needed functionality to your web working life. 

Which web based collaboration tools do you use the most?

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• The Future of Work Platforms: An Overview

This is why Google launched Google Apps Team Edition. Google Apps for Your Domain has been around for quite some time, but this set of tools requires someone from your IS department to administer it. Groups inside companies can easily subvert IS involvement by just entering your corporate email address and clicking on a link inside the resulting sign-up email.

That’s right, with no permission or approval forms*, you can do the following with your co-workers:

• generate and share documents, presentations, and spreadsheets with Google Docs
• easily schedule appointments with Google Calendar
• IM and conduct VoIP calls with Google Talk
• share a combined start page with a common iGoogle start page

Additionally, Google Apps Team Edition shows you others in your organization who have also signed up for Google Apps, enabling you to conduct the above mentioned activities with ease.

This is indeed an underhanded way to get Google Apps inside the enterprise. We at Web Worker Daily think Google Apps is a great way to collaboration on documents. The old school way of interfacing on documents centered around sending documents, spreadsheets, and presentations through email. The enterprise standard Microsoft Office Word has a “Track Changes” option which generally works well. However, what happens if not everyone on your team has Microsoft Office or worse yet: different versions of Microsoft Office? Being able to use Google Docs to generate the document and “Share” it with your colleagues is an attractive option.

On the other hand, having documents behind the firewall on centralized file servers has its advantages as well. Enterprises expend resources to ensure sensitive information stays in front of the proper audience. Having documents that may contain intellectual property is not a welcome thought to many companies. Additionally, having IM conversations that are unencrypted or archived may present legal, intellectual property, and human resource issues.

Google Apps Team Edition presents a fantastic option for lightweight collaboration among those who share documents. Also, being able to chat instantly and share calendars can present an attractive option for teammates. However, if intellectual property is a concern in any way, your organization should look at SharePoint, Jive’s ClearSpace or other offerings they have access to.

Which collaboration tools are your team working with? What tips would you have with working with the IS department?

* Disclaimer:  This article is not meant to encourage you to go around any policies or guidelines your company has on electronic communication and collaboration.  Before using Google Apps (or any other hosted collaboration tool), I suggest you consult your organization’s policies on such sites and services.

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• The Future of Work Platforms: An Overview