I can see why they changed the name from Big Piece O' I mean BPOS.
Don't trust us? Try these Office 365 stats, says Microsoft
Microsoft will publish data on the reliability of Office 365 to boost confidence in the online service – and yet it also warned that more outages are possible. The software giant said in a blog titled Cloud services you can trust: Office 365 availability that it now plans to publish uptime numbers for Office 365. The figures …
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Friday 9th August 2013 16:22 GMT jnemesh
Great uptime stats, but that is not the reason we don't trust you Microsoft! I am sure the NSA loves digging through Office documents for TERRORISM! (tm). Until the US Government stops spying on it's own citizens and the rest of the world, I think their popularity is going to decline in favor of SECURE open source alternatives.
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Sunday 11th August 2013 11:25 GMT Christian Berger
Maybe not dying, but in panic
Considering how Microsoft currently tries to follow every (semi) successful strategies other companies had, with products taking their worst ideas even further, they must be in a hell of a panic.
Microsoft doesn't seem to understand where their success lies: Legacy systems and people with no clue.
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Monday 12th August 2013 14:28 GMT MacGyver
Re: M$ dying?
When they try to push that TIPKAM/TIFKAM onto their MS Server 2012 users, they will loose their shirts.
All their products suck as of late, and they seem to care only about looks and App stores, and no one in the enterprise world gives a flying FAQ about either of those.
Example: Out of the 255 RADIUS attributes out there, MS has attribute replacement mechanisms for 3 of them, about the only thing MS Network Policy Server does well is pawning it's functions off on 3rd party solutions.
I would say it was nice knowing them, but it hasn't, at least not for about 7 years.
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Friday 9th August 2013 18:23 GMT Anonymous Coward
Who cares what the uptime is? There's 3 elements, at least here - the computer; the internet connection and MS's cloud. If one of those elements fail, no work can get done. If you do your stuff locally then there's just 1 point of failure...the computer.
That's without even getting into trust and privacy issues. And the fact that once they have you by the bollocks prices may increase. Server uptime isn't the thing I'm mistrusting here. It's the concept; the company; MS's motivatons; and the cloud in general.
Of course, you do sometimes have to collaborate on a document and emailing back and forth is a bit cumbersome; but I have no need whatsoever for cloudy documents.
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Saturday 10th August 2013 18:32 GMT Nuke
@ Moiety
Wrote :- "And the fact that once they have you by the bollocks prices may increase."
Agreed, but it is not just that. Everybody already has office software; even my 20 year old copy of WordPerfect does all I need in word processing. This is not good for Microsoft, as software does not wear out and you might never buy anything from them again.
But if MS can get you to throw away that software entirely and rent their cloud based service instead, they are assured of a steady, predictable income for evermore, even if they do not raise the price extortionately.
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Friday 9th August 2013 19:20 GMT Nate Amsden
What constitutes an outage?
Some SLAs are pretty lax.. Amazon has the worst SLA of any provider I have seen where they only consider things an outage if multiple zones are down and your not able to spin up resources in a remaining zone. Losing half of your infrastructure is not an outage for them, that's just your fault for not building it right.
Others the outages have to last for some period of consecutive time, many companies aren't proactive about outages and won't credit you unless you happen to report the outage to them.
The strictest SLA I have come across has been from Dynect(managed DNS), where they say an outage of longer than 15 seconds violates the SLA. I've never noticed an outage with them(in about 4 years), and I think they advertise 10+ years of 100% uptime or something like that. But when I read the SLA I just thought to myself, I don't even have a way to measure a 15 second outage.
At one company I was told a story about something that happened briefly before I started, there was a major DNS outage at their hosted DNS provider(I think 30-90mins), the provider did credit them back but the credit was something like $5 (relative to what they paid per month). The CTO at the time said "obviously we're not paying enough for this kind of service, I spent 10x more money on our consultants to track the source of the problem, not even taking into account lost business than we got back". I thought it was funny at least.
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Friday 9th August 2013 19:27 GMT Nate Amsden
Re: What constitutes an outage?
oh and one more tidbit .. UltraDNS is obviously another huge player in the space(the biggest I believe). Amazon(of all folks) used to use them exclusively. Then one day about 2 and a half years ago for some reason I did a WHOIS on amazon.com, and saw half the name servers were Dynect, the other half UltraDNS. I asked a friend at Dynect what was up with that and he said that UltraDNS had some sort of outage during a holiday season and Amazon decided to sign up with Dynect to provide extra redundancy.
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Friday 9th August 2013 22:41 GMT westlake
Office 365 is a tiered subscription service.
You will most likely have the full MS Office Suite resident on your PC and automatic synchronization of locally stored files with those stored in the cloud.
Your work will not come to a screeching halt if Sky Drive is down or you can't access the Internet.
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Monday 12th August 2013 11:48 GMT Anonymous Coward
True but not true
Some editions of O365 come with local apps but not all, if you haven't had the option of "streaming" office to your desktop you will struggle without a connection or if the servers are down. Also, if you rely on the exchange that comes with O365 you will struggle without a connection or server issues. However, people who criticise are missing the point, O365 is very good for small organisations who need email, a website and to be able to share stuff without having to invest in a server and someone to support it. It is an office out of the box, which is exactly what a lot of small organisation need.
Having set O365 up for a small business, one thing I will say is that it either works, or it doesn't, if you are unfortunate enough to need "support" be prepared for a bunch of robots who don't read the support request you raised and read off a script very often in that robotic fake american accent that makes you wonder if MS have aced the Turin test. After various issues with "Exchange" collecting emails from an external account, I gave up and decided it was far easier to stick with Outlook on the desktop. If you switch your mail exchange to O365 this issue probably goes away and you can still use exchange for shared calenders etc anyway.
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Monday 12th August 2013 13:00 GMT Anonymous Coward
Re: Desperate MS it seems
"because 50 clicks, 10 reboots, and numerous Powershell script runs = 5 clicks and two reboots in VMware."
You mean compared to using vCentre - a $6K console...
For the Microsoft example - that would be without SCVMM + Orchestrator + App Manager - with those, it's the equivalent of the entire vSphere suite...at a fraction of the cost.
nb - All functionality that is an optional extra or expensive CPU license in vSphere like replication - is included for free in Hyper-V server....
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Monday 12th August 2013 08:22 GMT Anonymous Coward
Three words: bull fornicating feces.
I have small clients that use Office365, and they have had nowhere near 99.9% uptime during that period. 99% availability during business hours (2 "9s") is closer to the truth, including some outages that lasted nearly the entire business day. I'd be interested to know exactly how they define "uptime," as some of the outages were reliant on services that were down but might not be considered as part of Microsoft Office365 (authentication, etc). Office365 is still a very good deal for certain organizations, but to say their uptime is great is a flat-out, absolute lie.
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Monday 12th August 2013 09:39 GMT Pascal Monett
I'd be interested to know exactly how they define "uptime,"
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Easy, the operator turns around and checks that the green light is flashing for disk activity. If it is, everything is A-OK.
What was that you said ? You still can't connect to your storage space ? Have you tried rebooting the Internet ?
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