Office 365 Beta Review from Jornata

Jornata is a Microsoft customer and partner, participating in the Office 365 Beta for small businesses. The company gained its first experiences with the Office 365 suite of collaborative tools through the Business Productivity Online Suite (BPOS), which evolved into Office 365.  Bringing expertise in SharePoint and cloud computing, Jornata helps customers begin running their businesses using Office 365. 

I asked Scott Jamison, Jornata CEO and Managing Partner, to describe some of their experience with Microsoft cloud deployments. Let’s hear from him now.

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Over the past 2 years we’ve explored both on-premise and cloud options from several vendors, finding that Microsoft’s cloud offering provides the best value and overall user experience. We get a fantastic desktop experience, browser-based access, and free mobile support over a variety of phones.

Using the cloud, we can streamline operations as well. Since we use Microsoft Online Services, we don’t run any production servers in-house and we are spending more time talking to our customers, understanding what they need, and delivering for them than when we were working purely with on-premises IT infrastructure.

Looking back, another factor in our cloud selection processes was choosing a vendor with proven enterprise experience. Specifically, we sought three key areas of expertise: security, privacy, and support. Why? When I spoke to customers considering a cloud solution, they shared our desire to ensure that corporate data is secure and private. Our customers are particularly concerned with some of the non-Microsoft offerings with published claims for enterprise readiness which lack the level of security and privacy that Office 365 offers. For example, some of these offerings mine employee information for ad targeting – not something that my customers desire in their corporate solution.

Our customers also asked for 99.9% uptime and dependable support. Here’s a story from our experience with Microsoft Online Services support. We actually deleted our entire SharePoint       Online-based Intranet site collection by mistake at one point. We called Microsoft Online support and in no time they had our Intranet back up and running with no concerns, and at no extra charge. Now, that’s support.

Scott Jamison, Managing Partner & CEO

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So, as a roundup, what does Office 365 provide for enterprises along with its financially-backed 99.9% uptime guarantee and Microsoft Online Protection for Exchange as the security anchor?

Office 365 provides email and calendaring tools and the “work from anywhere” capability that we need more and more. The web apps suite is broad and deep with Word, Excel, PowerPoint and OneNote, access to files from a mobile device, and consistent formatting abilities from desktop to web. The creative types are designing SharePoint team sites with easy-to-use tools. And Office 365 users share documents and collaborate on the web using Lync with its instant messaging, audio/video calls, and online meetings.

I hope to bring you more feedback from our beta customers and partners. Let us know about your experiences with Office 365!