In 2011, Microsoft Office 365 launched to mixed reviews. Under pressure from Google and Apple to get into the cloud office, Microsoft threw their hat in the ring and some early adopters were disappointed with the results. As Infoworld pointed out, a big weak point was in transitioning from other Microsoft solutions like Sharepoint to the cloud with Office 365:
“Those of you who are waiting patiently for Microsoft to move you from its old hosted server setup, BPOS, to its new and improved Office 365, still have a way to go — perhaps a very long way.”
The cloud offers a variety of advantages over a desktop solution, such as always up-to-date office applications and files anywhere, such as a PC, Mac, and mobile devices, but Office 365 came with high expectations. The future of Office wasn’t allowed to lack anything that you could do on the desktop version of Office without getting criticism. For the marketplace to embrace Office 365, Microsoft had to improve all of their weak points.
Three years later, we are happy to report that Office 365 has arrived as a mature Office solution. It is now as capable as the older desktop version while also providing the advantages of a cloud solution.
Transitioning to Office 365
Since Office is now a fully developed product, the next problem Microsoft tackled was in transitioning businesses from the desktop environment to the cloud. Those who need enterprise solutions have the resources to work out problems, but now everyone has a viable transition to a cloud-based office solution:
“SkyKick is a new kind of migration application that makes it fast, safe, & easy to migrate businesses to Office 365. SkyKick is designed to address the wide variety of migration scenarios that exist across the SMB (1-250 employee) landscape. We understand that every small and medium-sized business email environment is unique. That’s why we designed the SkyKick application — to handle thousands of different migration scenarios, personalized for every business situation.”
With the use of SkyKick, businesses shouldn’t have reservations about the transition to the cloud. We are comfortable recommending Office 365 to clients after years of deployment and testing.
