This is the blog of Neteffects Technologies, Inc. Visit us on the internet at http://www.neteffectstech.com.
We recently were hired to implement a cloud solution for a client. They needed to be able to share and collaborate among a dozen investment brokers across the planet. They needed to work collaboratively on development of investment opportunity brochures and to have ready access to them without having to email multiple versions back and forth.
The customer also had created a new identity and wanted to use a new email address separate from a legacy address the firm had used for many years without giving the legacy address up. A top priority for this group’s leadership was the ability to share contact information with each other.
After considering a number of options, the document and contact collaboration/sharing need only seemed to be served by Microsoft’s SharePoint server which is part of an on-line offering called Office 365.
We opened a free trial account and built a template of what a collection of the O365 system would like and how it would operate. The customer approved it and we went forward from the initial pilot using fake data with real Outlook contacts and the new email domain name.
Office 365 is quite a different experience than all of the Office programs combined and it was a learning process for us and the customer. It is so feature rich that a user has to take time to learn how to use it affectively. Microsoft makes the process less painful for busy business people by providing how-to videos and subject matter specific booklets on different features.
Over time the group has learned most of what they need to know. Email was simple as O365 offers hosted Exchange which will integrate with Outlook 2007 or 2010. SharePoint also integrates with a users’ Outlook program to provide “shared contacts” contributed by each team member.
The experience demonstrated that while many up front hardware and software costs are avoided through the use of cloud based services, there are still considerable expenses born for the deployment which required a semi-skilled programmer. Still, after months of use, there have been no need of tech support and back up is automatic!
We learned that, at least with Office 365, the system will integrate with end users’ client software, they are most effective when the user has a very current system running Windows 7 and Office 2010. O365 will work with Office 2007 fairly well, but not with earlier releases.
This pressed an unexpected cost into the equation as the customer was using all XP SP 3 PCs with Office 2003, so they had to upgrade the older office programs to 2010. That should have caused them to upgrade their aging hardware also, but they elected not to.
So, if you are considering using a cloud based system, we have acquired considerable experience and will be of greater value to you. Give us a call!~
