Since October 2010, Microsoft has allowed a limited number of people to use its Office 365 beta, a cloud-hosted set of Office servers, enabling full use of all Office tools. Office 365 offers multi-tenanted versions of the Office family servers including Exchange 2010, SharePoint 2010 and Lync 2010.

The idea is not new – organizations have been asking for anywhere, anytime access to applications and services for a long time. Office 365 combines Office, SharePoint, Exchange and Lync in a unified cloud.

Easy to start – When users log in for the first time, users get shortcuts to the key services they want (Outlook Web Access for email and calendar, SharePoint, download to Lync client). There is no need to permanently use these shortcuts; Office 365 van easily be used from desktop tools (e.g., Outlook).

Lync – When using Lync, the whitelist option allows users to lock down conversations with trusted partners. Microsoft is working on enhancing this feature enabling online collaboration in Office 365. Office 365 currently offers IM, VoIP and video chat in the Lync 2010 client, as well as the ability to deliver slides to online meetings.

SharePoint and Exchange – Office 365’s SharePoint and Exchange implementation is straightforward, providing Access, Excel, and InfoPath services. It can also be used for some basic computing and storage. This opens a whole new set of challenges, including migration of existing data to the cloud. As DataMills, we are looking into reducing risks for such transitions.

We would like to conclude by saying that we don’t see Office 365 as a threat to IT professionals at all. Instead, we strongly feel that it will give organizations the tools to expand and also to protect their skilled IT staff from basic administration tasks.