Office 365 vs. Google Apps – Microsoft strikes back

Service Wars

Article from ADMIN 06/2011

By Björn Bürstinghaus

Office 365 is Microsoft's new, easy-to-manage cloud solution for email, tasks, and contacts, as well as real-time collaboration throughout the enterprise.

Microsoft's new Office 365 [1] cloud service is available in a variety of plans and offers an array of services, including: Exchange Online, SharePoint Online including the Office Web Apps, and Lync Online. For smaller companies in particular, Office 365 provides an interesting alternative, because administration is kept very simple and the cloud services are presented to users with a familiar MS Office look and feel (Figure 1).

Figure 1: Working in a familiar environment: the Outlook Web App in Office 365.

Office 365

To set up Office 365 [2], all you need is a domain with the provider of your choice. In an initial step, you will sign the domain for use with Office 365 in the web-based management interface (Figure 2). After checking broad legitimation for the domain by manually creating a CNAME record or adding another MX record (which can take up to 24 hours, depending on the provider and the DNS configuration), you can start to set up the global enterprise preferences for the use of the various cloud services in the management interface.

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