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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 thought of your iPhone or iPod touch falling into the wrong hands is enough to scare anyone. The iPhone does have the passcode function to keep prying eyes out, but what if that’s not enough?

In a corporate environment, the loss of a device like this is a major ordeal. Apple has touted the MobileMe remote wiping capabilities, but what if you don’t use MobileMe? If you are in a corporate environment, you probably connect to an exchange server for mail. Using OWA (Outlook Web Access) you can remotely wipe your lost or stolen iPhone/iPod touch and breath easy knowing your data is safe.

As I stated, this relies on using the Exchange email push functionality in the iPhone OS. I have only tested this with Exchange 2007 so I can’t verify how or if this works in older versions of Exchange. OWA is Microsoft’s fancy name for web mail so the first thing you need to do is access your company’s web mail.

1. After you successfully login, click on the Options button in the top right.
   
2. Now click on the Mobile Devices option in the left-hand menu.
   
3. You should now see your iPhone or iPod touch device listed. Click the radio button next to your device and the click Wipe All Data from Device…
   
4. You will get a confirmation dialog to confirm you really want to do this. After you confirm, the Status will change to Pending Wipe.
   
5. The next time your iPhone/iPod touch has an internet connection and checks in with Exchange, a secure wipe is initiated. This is what the screen looks like to the user.
   
6. After the wipe has been started, the status for the device in OWA will change to Wipe Successful and you can remove the device from the list.

You can give this a try on your own device if you want to see the magic. Be advised that it will take about an hour to wipe the device so you can’t use it during that time. After the wipe, you can restore from a backup in iTunes. Since this is done in OWA, you don’t even have to bother your Network Admin. Maybe you are a little embarrassed that you lost your iPhone. This way no one has to know. Your secret will be safe with me.

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So far we’ve had to sit back and watch while Office 2010 news for PC users rolled in, but the MacBU over at Microsoft has finally come through with details of when and what Mac users can expect regarding the industry-dominating productivity suite, announced at a press conference this morning. They also detailed some changes to the existing Office 2008, or at least to the way it’s sold, to tide us over.

First, the changes to 2008 will include a reduction in retail SKUs from three to two, a Home/Student Edition and a Business Edition. The new Business Edition will include Entourage Web Services Edition, MS Document Connection, additional templates and clip art, and some Lynda.com training sessions. This new pack will cost $399 and be available September 15, while the Home/Student Edition will continue to retail for $149.

Not much was revealed about the next version of Office, which has a target launch date of 2010′s holiday season, but the MacBU did drop one major bomb on Apple users. Entourage, the email application currently bundled with Mac Office, will be replaced by Outlook, a move which probably has IT departments everywhere who support a Mac/PC hybrid work environment jumping for joy. It still wont’ be exactly the same as Outlook for the PC, but it will support a greater range of Exchange features, including public calendars.

The new Outlook will also be a native Cocoa application, which should bode well for Mac integration, and sport a brand new database that includes support for Spotlight indexing and Time Machine backup. Outlook for Mac will also sport Information Rights Management, which should make sure that only recipients who have permission to access rights-managed content actually get to see or use it. Finally, it’ll also be able to sync tasks and notes.

Developers and advanced Office users will also be pleased to learn that Visual Basic for Applications, which wasn’t included in Office 2008. Microsoft received harsh criticism for the omission of VBA, which makes it relatively easy to add customization options such as menus and dialogs, and create macros to simplify tasks. MacBU group product manager Kurt Schmucker explained that user response factored heavily in their decision to re-introduce VBA support, saying “we know [VBA] is important to a section of our user base who needs cross platform compatibility, and we’re bringing that back.” VBA was left out of Office 2008 because of the difficulty in upgrading the software for Intel-based machines.

No word yet on any prospective pricing, naming or specific release dates for the next version of Office for Mac. I imagine some kind of upgrade pricing will be available, and it’s probably safe to assume that the pricing structure will closely resemble that of the 2008 suites. That is, if they’re allowed to sell it at all.

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However, a perfect storm of circumstances has required me to work remotely a greater-than-average amount of time. Since I am rarely within arm’s reach of my MacBook, my boss was gracious enough to let me use it as my primary computer. With all the discussions on what Apple has to do to get accepted in the enterprise, I found the faults actually lay more on the Microsoft side.

One disclaimer to get out of the way: As far as our IT group is concerned, my Mac is unsupported, unsanctioned, and likely an unwelcome presence. Therefore, Mac users who are actually able to call their IT groups for support may have a different experience.

File, Print and Email

One of the enterprise-related slides in Apple’s recent WWDC keynote talked up its file and print services. I can attest to this. Getting connected to our HP color printer on Windows usually involves ritual sacrifice with two goats and a chicken; on OS X it showed up as a Bonjour printer and, boom, it worked. Apple also talked up file sharing — no, not that kind of file sharing, the kind you do in an office with servers. I’ve found connecting to Windows servers can be touchy. Sometimes it works, sometimes it doesn’t, and sometimes when it doesn’t, my domain account gets locked out. Fun times.

For email, I use Microsoft Entourage to connect to our Exchange webmail server. I connect to that rather than our internal server to make it easy for me to check email when I’m not on the corporate LAN. Unfortunately, the only way I can do global address lookups is to use this AppleScript utility. Also, because of this, when I send out meeting invites, I can’t see Free/Busy information. No biggie; I can use webmail for that if I need to.

We’re also still on Exchange 2003, so none of the Exchange enhancements in Snow Leopard will help me out.

Microsoft SharePoint

I’m a tech writer for a large organization that uses Microsoft SharePoint as its document repository. Because it’s a Microsoft product, it pretty much refuses to play nice with any browser that’s not Internet Explorer. As a result, I can only perform the most basic of tasks. I can upload and approve documents, but I can’t edit a document directly on the server as I can if I’m accessing the library on Internet Explorer and a Microsoft SharePoint-compatible application. It’s kind of a pain downloading and re-uploading documents when the changes are relatively minor. Later this year, Microsoft is planning on adding the ability for Office 2008 to interact directly with SharePoint, so that might help.

I’m also responsible for some of the site administration tasks, and those only work under IE as well. If someone clicks on the “request access” link, I can give the proper access from the email I get. However, if I need to grant a user account access without that email, I need IE to perform that task — this has to do with how I choose the user in the browser; clicking the link in e-mail auto-populates some fields that don’t render properly. So far, the only way I can fully manage SharePoint is to run XP under Parallels.

Instant Messaging

We use a proprietary IM application that is PC-only. While employees can add my AIM account to their buddy lists, any group chat requests that originate on the corporate side don’t come across to Adium. Once again, the only solution is Parallels.

Visio

Like a lot of tech writers, I use Visio for my diagramming. I also like to embed the diagram as a Visio object in Word so it can be updated in-place without the source document. Simply put, there’s no way to replicate this functionality on the Mac. The closest I can come is using OmniGraffle Pro to create a Visio document. I’ve run into some serious compatibility issues on the Visio side during the conversion — curved lines and some fills get mangled.

Mac-PC Word transfers

With Word 2004, the only issues I ran into were Word documents with embedded Visio files. Now, with Word 2008, I haven’t noticed those problems. My standard template is somewhat complex and I’ve had zero issues going back and forth between the platforms.

Conclusion

While your experiences with Macs in the enterprise may vary, the more entrenched your organization is with Microsoft’s enterprise products, the harder your integration will be. While Microsoft is showing signs of realizing people use browsers other than Internet Explorer, making its products fully accessible by non-Microsoft operating systems is going to take a sea change within the company that could take years to even get started.

For me, the biggest issues are interacting with SharePoint and the lack of a true Visio application for OS X (and the ability to embed Visio drawings into Word 2008). While I’m looking forward to Microsoft improving SharePoint access with the current version, I’m hoping the next full release of Office has greater interactivity with Microsoft back-end products.

Right now, though, using my Mac in an enterprise environment means running Windows in a virtual machine to do some core tasks. That’s hardly an ideal situation.

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Even though Apple builds great products for the consumer, the company often misses the boat with business users. Snow Leopard stands to make serious inroads with Mac users in wingtips and pinstripes with native support for Microsoft Exchange Server. Mail, iCal, and Address Book will all be updated to talk directly with your Exchange account and in some cases, may work better than Entourage.

The Long & Winding Road

It’s taken a long time to get to this point, but the Mac has a long history of working with Microsoft. I think a little history is interesting here to show how we’ve arrived at Snow Leopard.

The Mac has had Microsoft Office almost from the beginning (Word and Excel for Mac were first released in 1985). Jaguar added LDAP access to Address Book. Panther introduced Windows Printer Sharing and Active Directory support so that you could log into a Windows Domain from a Macintosh. Tiger introduced Exchange accounts in Mail (though with IMAP access only) along with much improved support for Samba and Windows file sharing. The move to Intel gave us virtualization of Windows apps.

Leopard brought Boot Camp, of course, but this did nothing to help integrate Mac OS X itself into a Windows environment. But under the hood some exciting things were happening. The Address Book and Calendar stores were updated to offer better programmatic access and the Sync Services framework was updated. The result was that Mail and iCal were better at sharing data with each other and we got to-do items that were shared between those two apps. iCal was updated to access outside CalDAV accounts and Mail got Notes that (eventually) were able to sync with the iPhone.

The iPhone OS 2.0 firmware update pushed Exchange integration to new heights because Apple chose to license the ActiveSync technology from Microsoft. This put the iPhone on a level playing field with Windows Mobile devices and Outlook when accessing information stored in Exchange.

Snow Leopard

Snow Leopard brings all of this together: integrated email, calendar, and address book (with to-do’s and notes) with access to outside accounts and the ActiveSync technology used in the iPhone. In fact, Apple is touting that the Mac will now have out-of-the-box support for “Exchange Server 2007, something that Windows PC’s don’t have.” The requirement to use Exchange Server 2007 might disappoint some that are still on 2003, but it makes good sense when you consider that 2007 has the new Business Logic Layer that provides a consistent view of your mailboxes from any device and takes a lot of work out of writing client software. In fact, Entourage has been testing a beta version that also requires Exchange 2007 in order to take advantage of this technology to make Entourage behave more like Outlook does on a Windows PC.

Entourage?

Personally, I hope for Entourage to die a slow and horrible death. Having been on the support end of things, I have seen how hard it is to make Entourage work reliably. And when it fails? Look out, because all of your email messages, contact info, tasks, calendar items, etc. are stored in one big database file. Lose that file, and you’ve lost everything. And backing it up with Time Machine means you have copied a multigigabyte file to your backup drive every hour.

Recovering from errors in Mail, where each message is an individual file, is much simpler and it works beautifully with Time Machine and Spotlight because of this file structure. I know there are people that like the consolidated view of all information in one application, but I suspect that this preference comes more from force of habit after using Outlook than any real advantage.

So can Mail, iCal, and Address Book replace Entourage? I think so.

Mail

Mail provides access to your Exchange account right along any other IMAP or POP3 accounts. As a Mac user, you get all the cool Mac features like data detectors, Spotlight, and Quick Look. I’m impressed that Quick Look can display previews of Office documents even if you don’t have Microsoft Office for Mac installed on your machine. This might be a good reason to give iWork another look.

Quick Look

iCal

iCal will seamlessly blend your personal local calendars and your Exchange calendars in one view. I liked how the WWDC Keynote demo showed how iCal could intelligently schedule meetings to avoid conflicts, just like Outlook. And of course it’s still integrated with Mail and Address Book so you can see your to-do’s here or in Mail, and you can auto-fill addresses from Exchange.

Address Book

OK, contacts are not very sexy, but I do like how you can access the Global Address List from within any app that can talk to Address Book. That means Mail will auto-complete addresses as you type messages and iCal will auto-complete names as you create meeting invitations. I suppose it might mean that other apps like Delicious Library that integrate with Address Book will let you keep track of DVDs that you loan to people at work, even if they aren’t in your personal contact list. I also like how smart groups can blend your personal address book with the Exchange contacts. Very slick.

The Future of Microsoft Office

I see a big problem coming for the MacBU at Microsoft. One of the primary reasons to purchase the full version of Microsoft Office (the only reason?) was to get Exchange support. Now that Snow Leopard will include Exchange support natively, I suspect a lot of people will choose to purchase the Home & Student Edition, despite the language in the license that prevents you from using it for work-related activities. A decrease in revenue would naturally lead to a decrease in funding for future development. Despite my feelings about Entourage, Office is pretty useful. I hope that Apple pushes them a little hard (iWork updates will help too), but I hope they don’t push so hard that Office is abandoned. I have felt like Entourage has languished along for a few years now and if I don’t get my wish for it to just curl up and die, then maybe we can get a better, more reliable Entourage for people who want to use it.

The Future of the Mac at Work

I suspect that despite my enthusiasm, the initial support for Exchange in the first release of Snow Leopard is going to blow. I would advise caution about committing to abandoning Entourage, or a large-scale migration from Windows PCs and Outlook in 2009. The bugs, and there will be bugs, will get worked out though, and 2010 could be a very exciting year for the Mac in the business segment.

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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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I have been using MobileMe, and its previous incarnation DotMac, for just over two years. Everyone has talked about the great features it has as well as some of the near-misses. However, I haven’t seen anyone point out a major flaw in MobileMe — how it does not compare to Enterprise class offerings.

With MobileMe, we can sync our calendars, contacts and email. We have a version of “push” which really only provides instantaneous email, not calendars or contacts. Even Apple has gone on record to state what is “push” and what is not. A colleague here on TAB also wrote about what we should have expected for push when MobileMe was released, as compared to what we received.

There are three main Enterprise server synchronization tools for calendaring, contacts, email, notes and tasks in the market.

• Microsoft Exchange (or more specifically, Exchange ActiveSync)
• Good Mobile Messaging
• Blackberry Enterprise Server

Each of these services directly connects to Microsoft Exchange, Outlook, Outlook Web Access and Windows Mobile Devices/Blackberrys. If you have used any of these enterprise class services, you know what true “push” means (for calendars, contacts, email, notes and tasks).

One of the big misses that Apple left out of MobileMe is the ability to accept meeting invites from other users when not using a Mac. This especially causes problems when using the iPhone or the MobileMe web calendar.

In order to complete this meeting circle, we need to be able to accept these invites from anywhere. What makes this situation worse is that we cannot create/send meeting invites from the iPhone or the MobileMe web calendar. This is very frustrating, especially for those who use MobileMe for business (or personal business).

There are many situations where I am away from a computer and I want to send an invite to my wife for dinner (or maybe just put something on her calendar that I will be out for the evening). We both use MobileMe and yet my wife has to wait until I get home for me to send her the meeting invitation.

Another big miss is that Apple does not provide the ability to sync Tasks (To Dos in Apple speak) and Notes. Everyone and their mother has complained about Apple not supporting these two sync items, especially when adding tasks and notes on their iPhone or via the MobileMe web applications.

Thankfully, the Apple developer community has offered up solutions around these two missing items, some examples include:

• Evernote (for notes) – free
• Omnifocus (for tasks) – $79.95 + $19.95 for the iPhone App
• Remember The Milk (for tasks) – $25/year
• Things (for tasks) – $49.95 + 9.95 for the iPhone App

There are many other solutions, although these three offerings have either Mac or Web clients, as well as iPhone applications.

Yes, Apple did achieve a reasonably decent service with MobileMe. It has been generally reviewed as such. However, for Apple to provide Enterprise-class synchronization, they will need to ensure native support for the management of meeting invites as well as notes and tasks. Sadly, we have no idea when Apple will add this functionality. Here is my vote for a major announcement at the Macworld keynote…

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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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