Office 365 with its cloud-based solution to all your office needs seems like a mature and all-encompassing way of moving IT forward at many organizations. But what if your organization isn’t big enough to justify the price tag of the Enterprise version of Office 365, what if you’re a school, for example, what other choices do you have? Well, let’ take a look at some Open Source alternatives.
The obvious first place to look is Google Apps for Business. It’s not free, it costs $5 per user per month, or $50 per user per year. Google’s definition of a user is a distinct Gmail inbox. Everyone gets 30GB of Drive space, as well as Docs, Sheets, and Slides. Documents created in Drive can be shared both individually or by organization. Google Sites lets you create Web sites. Google Apps Vault is used to keep track of information created, stored, sent, and received through an organization’s Google Apps programs. You can access Apps for Business from mobile devices using Google’s mobile apps. One of the best apps for this is arguably the QuickOffice app for Android and iOS, which allows users. QuickOffice can edit Microsoft Office files stored in Drive. If you are a school, Google Apps for Education is completely free and has the new ‘Classroom’ product coming soon.
There’s also Zoho, which provides the standard office tools as well as a Campaigns tool, which lets you create e-mail and social campaigns for forthcoming events. Then there’s Free Office, which needs Java. And there’s OX, which offers files, e-mail, address book, calendar, tasks, plus a social media portal.
If you’re looking for an alternative to Outlook, there’s obviously Gmail, Yahoo, and Outlook (Hotmail). For Open Source alternatives, there’s Thunderbird, which comes with the numerous Add-ons, eg Lightening, its calendar software. There’s also Zimbra Desktop. It can access e-mail and data from VMware Zimbra, cloud e-mail like Gmail, and social networks like Facebook. And there’s Incredimail, but it doesn’t have a calendar. And finally there’s the Opera Email Client.
If you want an alternative to SharePoint then, probably, your first choice is Google Cloud Connect. This simple plug-in connects you to Google Docs and let you collaborate with other people. Edited documents are automatically sync’ed and sent to other team members. Or you might look at Alfresco. This free platform allows users to collaborate on documents and interact with others. There’s also Samepage, which comes with a paid for option. Or you could try Liferay Social Office Community Edition (CE). This is a downloadable desktop application. And there’s Nuxeo Open-Source CMS.
If you’re looking for an intranet, then there’s Mindtouch core, which seems to get good reviews. Alternatives include PBWiki, which includes a wiki, and is hosted by them and isn’t free for businesses. There’s GlassCubes, an online collaborative workspace, which, again has a cost implication. There’s Plone, a content management system built on Zope. There’s also Brushtail, HyperGate, Open Atrium, and Twiki.
The bottom line is that if you have power users, who are using lots of the features of Word, Excel, and PowerPoint, then you need those products. If your users are only scratching the surface of what you can do with Microsoft’s Office suite, then it makes sense to choose a much cheaper alternative. If you can use alternatives to Office, then you can probably start to think about using alternatives to other Microsoft products. Perhaps you can live without Outlook for e-mail and calendar. Maybe you’ve never really made the most of SharePoint and you could use an Open Source alternative for file sharing and running your intranet.
The issue is this: you can save huge amounts of money by using Open Source products rather than Office 365, but you will need to spend time learning how to use each ‘best of breed’ alternative and how to integrate it with the other products. That will take up someone’s time. Once you’ve weighed up the pros and cons, you can make a decision about whether to keep the faith and stay with Microsoft and have a great CV for another job using Microsoft products, or whether to save money and spend lots of time as you take your first steps into the wilderness. But what you’ll find is that wilderness is quite full of people who’ve also stepped away from the easy choice.
What will you do?
Showing posts with label Office 365. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Office 365. Show all posts
Sunday, 29 June 2014
Sunday, 22 June 2014
Plus ca change
I’ve worked with mainframes for over 30 years and I’m used to seeing trends moving in one direction and then, a few years later, going in the opposite direction. Each initiative gets sold to us as something completely new and the solution that we’ve been waiting. I imagine you share my experience. I originally worked on green screens with all the processing taking place on the mainframe. In fact, I can remember decks of cards being punched and fed into the mainframe. I can remember the excitement of everyone having their own little computer when PCs first came out. I can remember client/server being the ultimate answer to all our computing issues. Outsourcing, not outsourcing – we could wander down Memory Lane like this for a long time.
What always amazes me is when I’m working with sites that are predominantly Windows-based, and they still get that frisson of excitement over an idea that I think is pretty commonplace. It was only a few years ago (well maybe about five) that the Windows IT teams were all excited about VMware and the ability to virtualize hardware. They couldn’t believe mainframes had been doing that since the 1960s.
Then there was the excitement about using Citrix and giving users simple Linux terminals rather than more expensive PCs. Citrix have a host of products, including GoToMeeting – their conferencing software. With Citrix desktop solutions, all the applications live on the server rather than on each individual computer. It means you can launch a browser on your laptop, smartphone, tablet, or whatever device you like that has a browser, and see a Windows-looking desktop and all the usual applications. So, it’s just like a dumb terminal connecting to a mainframe, which does all the work and looks after all the data storage. Nothing new there!
And now Microsoft are selling Office 365, which, once you’ve paid your money, means that all the applications live in the cloud somewhere, and so does the data. It seems that all subscribers are like remote users, dialling into an organization’s mainframe that could be located in a different country or on a different continent. Looked at another way, IT departments are in many ways outsourcing their responsibilities – and we all remember when outsourcing was on everyone’s mind.
Office 365 seems like a very mature product and one whose time is about to come. You get more than just the familiar Office products like Word and Excel. You get SharePoint, Lync, and Exchange (and I’m talking about the Enterprise version of Office 365). Lync lets users chat to each other – a bit like using MSN used to. And SharePoint provides you with an intranet as well file and document management capabilities. You get Outlook, Publisher (my least-favourite piece of software), Access (the database), and InfoPath (used for electronic forms). You also get a nicely integrated Yammer – Microsoft’s Enterprise Social Networking (ESN) tool. There’s also PowerBI, a suite of business intelligence and self-serve data mining tools coming soon. This will integrate with Excel, so users can use the Power Query tool to create spreadsheets and graphs using public and private data, and also perform geovisualization with Bing Maps data using the Power Map tool.
And while the actual tools that are available on these different platforms and computing models, over time, are different, it’s the computing concepts that I’m suggesting come and go and come again, and go again! It’s like a battle between centralization and decentralization. Everyone likes to have that computing power on their phone or tablet, but whenever you need to do some real work, you connect (usually using a browser) to a distant computing monolith. So, plus ça change, plus c’est la même chose.
What always amazes me is when I’m working with sites that are predominantly Windows-based, and they still get that frisson of excitement over an idea that I think is pretty commonplace. It was only a few years ago (well maybe about five) that the Windows IT teams were all excited about VMware and the ability to virtualize hardware. They couldn’t believe mainframes had been doing that since the 1960s.
Then there was the excitement about using Citrix and giving users simple Linux terminals rather than more expensive PCs. Citrix have a host of products, including GoToMeeting – their conferencing software. With Citrix desktop solutions, all the applications live on the server rather than on each individual computer. It means you can launch a browser on your laptop, smartphone, tablet, or whatever device you like that has a browser, and see a Windows-looking desktop and all the usual applications. So, it’s just like a dumb terminal connecting to a mainframe, which does all the work and looks after all the data storage. Nothing new there!
And now Microsoft are selling Office 365, which, once you’ve paid your money, means that all the applications live in the cloud somewhere, and so does the data. It seems that all subscribers are like remote users, dialling into an organization’s mainframe that could be located in a different country or on a different continent. Looked at another way, IT departments are in many ways outsourcing their responsibilities – and we all remember when outsourcing was on everyone’s mind.
Office 365 seems like a very mature product and one whose time is about to come. You get more than just the familiar Office products like Word and Excel. You get SharePoint, Lync, and Exchange (and I’m talking about the Enterprise version of Office 365). Lync lets users chat to each other – a bit like using MSN used to. And SharePoint provides you with an intranet as well file and document management capabilities. You get Outlook, Publisher (my least-favourite piece of software), Access (the database), and InfoPath (used for electronic forms). You also get a nicely integrated Yammer – Microsoft’s Enterprise Social Networking (ESN) tool. There’s also PowerBI, a suite of business intelligence and self-serve data mining tools coming soon. This will integrate with Excel, so users can use the Power Query tool to create spreadsheets and graphs using public and private data, and also perform geovisualization with Bing Maps data using the Power Map tool.
And while the actual tools that are available on these different platforms and computing models, over time, are different, it’s the computing concepts that I’m suggesting come and go and come again, and go again! It’s like a battle between centralization and decentralization. Everyone likes to have that computing power on their phone or tablet, but whenever you need to do some real work, you connect (usually using a browser) to a distant computing monolith. So, plus ça change, plus c’est la même chose.
Sunday, 28 April 2013
Lync and Yammer
Over the past couple of years I’ve been working with SharePoint at various sites, and more recently with Lync and Yammer. Now these are two products that mainframers may not be that familiar with and I thought people might be interested to know more.
Microsoft Lync was called Microsoft Office Communicator. It’s an Instant Messaging client – like MSN Messenger or Yahoo! Messenger – that can be used either with Microsoft Lync Server or Lync Online, which is available with Microsoft Office 365. In fact it is an up-to-date version of Windows Messenger which was used with Microsoft Exchange Server.
As well as running on PCs, Lync 2010 has Windows Phone, Android, and iOS apps. Lync provides instant messaging, Voice Over IP, and video conferencing facilities, and uses Microsoft Outlook contacts stored in a Microsoft Exchange Server. Office can show whether other people are working on the same document, and Lync allows file sharing.
What makes it so useful is those really unimportant e-mails that you don’t need an audit trail for can be replaced by Instant Messaging conversations. That cuts down on the number of e-mails that need to be backed up each evening and eventually stored on the off-chance they’re important. And, of course, you can type or you can talk. And you can set up meetings with people in offices around the country and video conference – assuming your organization has the bandwidth to do so.
Lync and Sharepoint integrate to an extent – they’re both from Microsoft. For example, there’s an “online presence indicator next to an individual’s name wherever their name appears in a site collection in SharePoint”. “Assist in providing colleague suggestions for use in My Sites, My Profiles, and People Search”. And “through Lync, provide access to SharePoint people and skills search including names and skills and a link to the user’s My Site”. Thank you to J D Wade, who’s blog at http://wadingthrough.com/2012/04/04/lync-and-sharepoint-integration-more-than-presence-information/ was the source for these examples.
Yammer is described as an enterprise social network service. It was launched in 2008, but, more importantly, Microsoft bought it last year. Yammer acts like a corporate Facebook service. It allows people to send message to other individuals or to groups. Only people with the same domain name in their e-mail address can access the corporate Yammer network. As well as access from a PC, there’s Android Windows Phone and iPhone apps available.
Chris Wright, in his blog at http://www.cmswire.com/cms/social-business/five-yammer-features-that-sharepoint-users-are-going-to-love-020339.php, lists features of Yammer that SharePoint users will like. Chris says “SharePoint has never really had its own ‘messaging’ system, so the Yammer Inbox fills a real gap”. Chris adds: “Yammer polls are a nice quick way to ask a question of people in your community, and will add a lot to the sense of community SharePoint is trying to foster”. Looking ahead, Chris says that documents held in a Yammer feed can be edited in Office web apps. He says: “This is a great example of a few of the features SharePoint is bringing to the table to improve Yammer (rather than the other way round)”.
We know that Microsoft plans to integrate Yammer with SharePoint and Office 365. It appears that Yammer will eventually replace SharePoint’s newsfeed. It seems there’s a plan to share documents with Yammer using SharePoint. And Yammer users will be able to upload and store documents using SkyDrive Pro. A file preview and edit capability with Yammer will work in conjunction with Office Web Apps. There’s even talk about translation capabilities being added to Yammer. Eventually Yammer and Lync (and Exchange) will be integrated.
The integration of Yammer builds on Open Graph – an open API protocol for following objects external to a social network site used by Facebook. IBMers are perhaps more familiar with OpenSocial 2.0 for IBM Connections. Both provide a way for people to follow things.
What makes Yammer and SharePoint integration so interesting is that staff can use a the type of social media they’re familiar with from home in a business situation. If I can see you’re meeting client A tomorrow, I might ask you to check how he thinks project X is going. Or I might even just want to say hello to someone who is an occasional customer. Yammer is a business tool that is fun and easy to use – certainly compared to the more heavyweight Web parts etc of SharePoint.
The fact that Instant Messaging and social media can be included in a business environment shows that these tools are maturing. And, like BYOD, it shows end users are driving the environment they want to experience at work. I wonder how long it will be, with IBM’s pushing of social media tools, before something like this is available to everyone on z/OS.
Microsoft Lync was called Microsoft Office Communicator. It’s an Instant Messaging client – like MSN Messenger or Yahoo! Messenger – that can be used either with Microsoft Lync Server or Lync Online, which is available with Microsoft Office 365. In fact it is an up-to-date version of Windows Messenger which was used with Microsoft Exchange Server.
As well as running on PCs, Lync 2010 has Windows Phone, Android, and iOS apps. Lync provides instant messaging, Voice Over IP, and video conferencing facilities, and uses Microsoft Outlook contacts stored in a Microsoft Exchange Server. Office can show whether other people are working on the same document, and Lync allows file sharing.
What makes it so useful is those really unimportant e-mails that you don’t need an audit trail for can be replaced by Instant Messaging conversations. That cuts down on the number of e-mails that need to be backed up each evening and eventually stored on the off-chance they’re important. And, of course, you can type or you can talk. And you can set up meetings with people in offices around the country and video conference – assuming your organization has the bandwidth to do so.
Lync and Sharepoint integrate to an extent – they’re both from Microsoft. For example, there’s an “online presence indicator next to an individual’s name wherever their name appears in a site collection in SharePoint”. “Assist in providing colleague suggestions for use in My Sites, My Profiles, and People Search”. And “through Lync, provide access to SharePoint people and skills search including names and skills and a link to the user’s My Site”. Thank you to J D Wade, who’s blog at http://wadingthrough.com/2012/04/04/lync-and-sharepoint-integration-more-than-presence-information/ was the source for these examples.
Yammer is described as an enterprise social network service. It was launched in 2008, but, more importantly, Microsoft bought it last year. Yammer acts like a corporate Facebook service. It allows people to send message to other individuals or to groups. Only people with the same domain name in their e-mail address can access the corporate Yammer network. As well as access from a PC, there’s Android Windows Phone and iPhone apps available.
Chris Wright, in his blog at http://www.cmswire.com/cms/social-business/five-yammer-features-that-sharepoint-users-are-going-to-love-020339.php, lists features of Yammer that SharePoint users will like. Chris says “SharePoint has never really had its own ‘messaging’ system, so the Yammer Inbox fills a real gap”. Chris adds: “Yammer polls are a nice quick way to ask a question of people in your community, and will add a lot to the sense of community SharePoint is trying to foster”. Looking ahead, Chris says that documents held in a Yammer feed can be edited in Office web apps. He says: “This is a great example of a few of the features SharePoint is bringing to the table to improve Yammer (rather than the other way round)”.
We know that Microsoft plans to integrate Yammer with SharePoint and Office 365. It appears that Yammer will eventually replace SharePoint’s newsfeed. It seems there’s a plan to share documents with Yammer using SharePoint. And Yammer users will be able to upload and store documents using SkyDrive Pro. A file preview and edit capability with Yammer will work in conjunction with Office Web Apps. There’s even talk about translation capabilities being added to Yammer. Eventually Yammer and Lync (and Exchange) will be integrated.
The integration of Yammer builds on Open Graph – an open API protocol for following objects external to a social network site used by Facebook. IBMers are perhaps more familiar with OpenSocial 2.0 for IBM Connections. Both provide a way for people to follow things.
What makes Yammer and SharePoint integration so interesting is that staff can use a the type of social media they’re familiar with from home in a business situation. If I can see you’re meeting client A tomorrow, I might ask you to check how he thinks project X is going. Or I might even just want to say hello to someone who is an occasional customer. Yammer is a business tool that is fun and easy to use – certainly compared to the more heavyweight Web parts etc of SharePoint.
The fact that Instant Messaging and social media can be included in a business environment shows that these tools are maturing. And, like BYOD, it shows end users are driving the environment they want to experience at work. I wonder how long it will be, with IBM’s pushing of social media tools, before something like this is available to everyone on z/OS.
Sunday, 15 May 2011
All change in the office
It started with me looking for the best ‘office’ application to run under Honeycomb (Android 3) on a tablet – but I got sidetracked. It seems that Oracle has dumped OpenOffice, and Microsoft has a beta of Office 365 – it’s new cloud variant of the ubiquitous office software.
Oracle has given OpenOffice back to the user community, while at the same time strongly supporting open standards such as ODF (Open Document Format). Oracle got OpenOffice with its acquisition of Sun Microsystems a few months ago. Last September, unhappy community members set up the Document Foundation and LibreOffice. There was some talk of Oracle rewriting OpenOffice using JavaFX, but nothing seems to have come of that. There was also talk of Oracle cloud office, but again that seems to have sunk without trace. You can download the latest LibreOffice version from www.libreoffice.org/download/.
It’s worth noting that IBM is a fan of OpenOffice. IBM did try to sell the office suite it got from its Lotus acquisition. Word Pro was based on Ami Pro, which Lotus had got from acquiring Samna back in 1990. In 2007, IBM introduced Lotus Symphony, which included a word processor, a spreadsheet, and a presentation program. Version 3 came out in October last year.
Google Apps free offers Gmail, Google Calendar, Google Sites (to create Web sites and group wikis), and Google Docs (for online documents, presentations, and spreadsheets). Google Apps for Business offers Google Apps Marketplace, Google Cloud Connect for Microsoft Office, and more.
Meanwhile, Microsoft is moving ahead with a cloud version of its Office software. You can join the beta program for Office 365 at www.microsoft.com/en-us/office365/small-business/beta.aspx.
The Office 365 beta is a subscription service providing Office Web apps and online communications and collaboration services. So you get Word, Excel, and PowerPoint, plus e-mail and calendar facilities, team sites (like SharePoint), and instant messaging and online meetings. Look out for Microsoft Lync 2010, which replaces Office Communications Online and Office Live Meeting.
And remember, to sound like you know about cloud computing, say things like Software as a Service (SaaS) and Windows Azure, which is Microsoft’s cloud storage and processing platform.
If you’re tempted, Office 365 Small Business costs $6 per user per month. Google Apps for Business cost is cheaper at $60 per year or there’s a free version. On the other hand, it can be argued that the Microsoft offering is more complete and Google’s lacks Outlook integration. It all depends on how dedicated a Microsoft site you’re at or how keen you’ve been to embrace Google’s products.
Now, what am I going to put on that tablet?
Oracle has given OpenOffice back to the user community, while at the same time strongly supporting open standards such as ODF (Open Document Format). Oracle got OpenOffice with its acquisition of Sun Microsystems a few months ago. Last September, unhappy community members set up the Document Foundation and LibreOffice. There was some talk of Oracle rewriting OpenOffice using JavaFX, but nothing seems to have come of that. There was also talk of Oracle cloud office, but again that seems to have sunk without trace. You can download the latest LibreOffice version from www.libreoffice.org/download/.
It’s worth noting that IBM is a fan of OpenOffice. IBM did try to sell the office suite it got from its Lotus acquisition. Word Pro was based on Ami Pro, which Lotus had got from acquiring Samna back in 1990. In 2007, IBM introduced Lotus Symphony, which included a word processor, a spreadsheet, and a presentation program. Version 3 came out in October last year.
Google Apps free offers Gmail, Google Calendar, Google Sites (to create Web sites and group wikis), and Google Docs (for online documents, presentations, and spreadsheets). Google Apps for Business offers Google Apps Marketplace, Google Cloud Connect for Microsoft Office, and more.
Meanwhile, Microsoft is moving ahead with a cloud version of its Office software. You can join the beta program for Office 365 at www.microsoft.com/en-us/office365/small-business/beta.aspx.
The Office 365 beta is a subscription service providing Office Web apps and online communications and collaboration services. So you get Word, Excel, and PowerPoint, plus e-mail and calendar facilities, team sites (like SharePoint), and instant messaging and online meetings. Look out for Microsoft Lync 2010, which replaces Office Communications Online and Office Live Meeting.
And remember, to sound like you know about cloud computing, say things like Software as a Service (SaaS) and Windows Azure, which is Microsoft’s cloud storage and processing platform.
If you’re tempted, Office 365 Small Business costs $6 per user per month. Google Apps for Business cost is cheaper at $60 per year or there’s a free version. On the other hand, it can be argued that the Microsoft offering is more complete and Google’s lacks Outlook integration. It all depends on how dedicated a Microsoft site you’re at or how keen you’ve been to embrace Google’s products.
Now, what am I going to put on that tablet?
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