In case you’ve been living under a rock with the Geico guy:![logo-office-365[1]](https://mikecrowley.files.wordpress.com/2011/06/logo-office-3651.png "logo-office-365[1]"){kind=logo}
http://www.microsoft.com/presspass/press/2011/jun11/06-28MSOffice365PR.mspx
This is not just another product announcement. If your work is to support Microsoft technologies, this is something you must learn about…
Mike Crowley's Whiteboard 
I’ll be honest, I’m not entirely sure what the fuss is about… but perhaps I don’t understand exactly what Office 365 is, as the marketing bumf on the MS site doesn’t really explain what it ACTUALLY is very well. Care to give us a biref technical summary of what it actually is and what it consists of? To me it just seems like your average hosted exchange and hosted sharepoint services…
Thanks for your comment! I certainly have plenty to say about Office 365, but I don’t like to post on well-worn topics, unless I feel I have something unique to add. Check out other sites like Jorge’s (http://jorgerdiaz.wordpress.com) and I’ll comment more as time goes on and as more customer use cases formalize.
wow, could I have said the word “actually” any more in that last post… 🙂
Actually…
IMHO the difference here isn’t that Microsoft has entered the hosting game. The mere fact they are in the game *is* a big deal, but the real change here is the point that the products are now being *architected* for Office 365. Look at Exchange 2010 SP2 for example. The flagship feature is the coexistence wizard. I speculate that in the future, and as the services mature, Microsoft will become less gentle with on-premises customers and the recommendations to use Office365, Azure and other cloud products to become very strong…
Yeah I’ve already noticed every single technet or MSDN newsletter I get mentions “the cloud” in every other paragraph 🙂 I just still don’t understand what the benefit is for the end user – the only benefit to hosted services I can see is that from an IT admin’s point of view it is one less system to maintain and update, but that single benefit hardly seems worthy of the massive push that MS and other vendors are giving to cloud services so I figure I must be missing something..
The benifits are huge. The mere fact that the life cycle of server hardware replacement is no longer needed on-premise. The fact that most cloud based services have redudency built into the datacenter. This all saves money. Of course, there are some negative like security, SLA and ROI. I am sure most small businesses would over look these negatives to save money.
May be one day you will not have to buy a computer really, just a tablet of some sort. May be you will just use a web os and pay for a VDI type service. The amount you pay is based of how much ram or cpu power you want. I believe Mike brought this up on day.
I thing cloud based services are the way to go. Just my $0.02.