Office 365 Growth Opportunity 'a Lot Bigger Than Anything We've Achieved', Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella Says (cnbc.com) 153
Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella on Monday suggested that Microsoft could grow more from its Office 365 line of cloud productivity apps than anything in the company's 43-year history. From a report: With business editions of Office 365, Microsoft faces competition from Google, as well as younger players like Box and Dropbox, in the race to get companies collaborating in apps running on remote cloud servers. "The growth opportunity for what is Office 365 is a lot bigger than anything we've achieved, even with our high penetration in the client-server world," Nadella said at the Morgan Stanley Technology Media and Telecom conference in San Francisco. When companies transition from Microsoft's traditional licensing business to cloud-based subscriptions, it's "not a one-for-one move," Nadella told Morgan Stanley analyst Keith Weiss at the event. Microsoft recently introduced the Microsoft 365 bundle, which includes Office as well as Windows, along with enterprise security and mobility services. Nadella also talked up the company's potential in the Azure public cloud infrastructure business, where it competes with Google as well as Amazon Web Services. "We had a good business in our server business, but this business is orders of magnitude bigger than what used to be a successful server business," he said.
Yeah no shit. (Score:5, Insightful)
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Subscription model is user abuse. Well done.
Couldn't agree more, but this is the future consumers obviously want, as they vote with their wallets and support this bullshit by the droves.
I laugh every time I hear about the "cord cutters" bragging about how they're saving money. HBO, Netflix, Disney, Hulu, UFC...the content fracturing is endless, and soon the aggregated monthly cost to access all the shit you want to watch will be twice as much as cable ever was.
The concept of ownership will soon be completely dead.
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I laugh every time I hear about the "cord cutters" bragging about how they're saving money.
Then you're missing the big picture. I am saving money, because I used to subscribe to cable then satellite.
Now I subscribe to nothing and I don't miss TV at all. There really wasn't anything on worth watching anymore, so I've tuned out completely.
There are just so many better ways to spend your time and money.
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Re:Yeah no shit. (Score:4, Insightful)
I laugh every time I hear about the "cord cutters" bragging about how they're saving money. HBO, Netflix, Disney, Hulu, UFC...the content fracturing is endless, and soon the aggregated monthly cost to access all the shit you want to watch will be twice as much as cable ever was.
As you say, only if you want to watch all that shit. One can lead a perfectly fulfilled, complete life without accessing all that shit, as you appropriately call it. And save for other undertakings.
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No, I'm not buying every single channel I used to get with satellite. No one ever watched all channels they could receive. It does save money to cut the cord, lots of it. Even if I got all of HBO, netflix, amazon, and hulu, it's still half the cost of satellite (which in turn is much cheaper than cable). People aren't cutting the cord because it's the cool thing to do, but because they realize they're paying for an expensive service and they're not getting their money's worth, it's an economic decision.
Mic
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Microsoft is pushing the subscription model becuase they've seen the writing on the wall that users are not upgrading as regularly as they like which cuts into profits.
As with music, failing to make a sale is not cutting into profits. Profits come from actual sales. If a company assumes it will reach a certain target and don't, this does not mean something is 'cutting into profits'. I've never understood the thinking that a company is somehow entitled to make money and that the buying public has some sort of obligation to spend their money. This seems to me to be the result of supply side economics. It is as stupid as thinking that somehow, if one only offers beef in
Why TV ? Go out in the sun ? (Score:3)
I laugh every time I hear about the "cord cutters" bragging about how they're saving money. HBO, Netflix, Disney, Hulu, UFC...the content fracturing is endless, and soon the aggregated monthly cost to access all the shit you want to watch will be twice as much as cable ever was.
Or, you know, you could realize that the "glowing box with moving pictures on it that dumbs you down" isn't an absolute requirement to fill your life.
Watching series or movies, no matter where from (/HBO, Netflix, whatever) isn't the only form of entertainment available to humanity.
You could also go out more and do some outdoor activity. /. and basement dwellers.
Yes, I know,
But doing some outdoor exercise could be also good for your general health, extend a bit your life expectancy and even more increase yo
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Cable only makes sense for people who have kids.
Less and less - these days, through YouTube and a few other outlets, one can get enough free material to keep kids entertained.
Re:Yeah no shit. (Score:5, Insightful)
Cable only makes sense for people who have kids.
Nonsense. Cable is the worst thing for kids. A constant stream of commercials demanding their attention, a thousand channels of shit. My three (14, 9, 5) only ever see commercials when they're at a friend's house and the interruption drives them nuts. Netflix has a good selection of kid's content and between plex and what we rent from appletv... the rest is covered.
Cable TV is an abomination and needs to die.
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Disagree. There's nothing inherently "abusive" about a subscription model.
If your TCO is higher and you don't care for the cloud service benefits or any of the other perks, then say that. It's a different issue.
Re:Yeah no shit. (Score:5, Interesting)
I'm still trying to figure out the benefits of storing your data on multiple servers that you have no control over, and no idea where exactly they are. When you delete a file from the cloud, is it actually properly deleted? If the cloud is attacked, how long will it take for the parent company to admit they were hacked? I like the concept of cloud storage, but I have 0 trust or faith in that system at all.
Re:Yeah no shit. (Score:5, Insightful)
Let's see here.
Benefits: Your data is managed by experts whose main focus is keeping everyone's data secure, available and reliable. Multiple servers ensure redundancy and if needed globally available to allow for minimal latency.
"you have no control over", "is [a file] actually properly deleted"
Is this any different than trusting your local IT professional? What would be the fallout it if your AWS, Azure, Google, ect... was found to not treat a customers data in a secure and private way (please don't use a counter example from a middle tier service like iCloud, one drive, or google drive)?
"If the cloud is attacked, how long will it take for the parent company to admit they were hacked?"
A lot sooner, now that the EU is putting GDPR into place.
-- A personal opinion from your friendly Azure engineer
Re: Yeah no shit. (Score:1)
Meanwhile, the rest of the internet is agog that in 2018 the combined skills of every Microsoft employee on the planet still appear to be unable to configure its legion of crappy mailservers correctly. Forward DNS, reverse DNS, TLS certificate and EHLO names not matching, and a lovely little hole that allows them to act like open relays (no, I'm not broadcasting how that one works). In short, they can't even get the basics right, what hope does a user have of a decent service?
Re:Yeah no shit. (Score:5, Interesting)
We are starting to use Azure. We have an E5 license for ~5000 seats of Office 365, including OneDrive and Skype for Business. Given all of that, I am a bit biased. Also for full disclosure, we are building out a hybrid cloud with Azure to augment our four data centers (2 in the US, 1 in the UK, 1 in Dubai). I have also been doing IT for 20 years, so I have seen some trends come and go.
This whole FUD about "don't trust the cloud with your data" is getting REALLY old. Microsoft (and AWS) have more redundancy and security built into their infrastructure that you could ever hope to build into a private setup. I say this as someone who is managing close to 4 PB of data being remote replicated via SRDF (for our EMC gear) and array based replication (for the Pure stuff).
By the end of next year, we will have moved the majority of our remote office file server data into OneDrive and MS Teams. We are going to be able to save huge amounts of money by not having to buy Data Domain hardware to replicate back to our core data centers, and we are going to get better reliability, versioning and recovery options.
I trust Microsoft's security team of hundreds of engineers, analysts and support staff more than I trust the half dozen guys in house. And I say this as someone who has been interested in, and responsible for computer security since the mid-90s. There is no way that a small SOC at a mid-sized corporation can hold a candle to a 24x7 global operation like Microsoft (or Amazon). It just is not going to happen.
While we still run a lot of our applications in house, we are using Azure for development and proof of concept work. When you look at the costs of enterprise class storage with all of the compliance boxes checked (at rest encryption, remote replication, etc.) there is no way that we can provide storage in a cost competitive way to the business.
Our clients are slowly coming around to trusting the cloud as well. We work with heavy regulated industries including financial services and healthcare. We have a lot of sensitive data on our networks. But as our clients shift their own workloads to the cloud (I hate that term), they are becoming more permissive of allowing us to move the data that we host for them there as well.
I think that in 10 years from now, the only companies that are going to still be hosting their own infrastructure are going to be big banks, tech and manufacturing firms that are still building things and need strict controls over their IP. Other than that, the costs of paying other people to run infrastructure for you are just too compelling. There is no way to stay competitive with that.
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The danger of the cloud is that it's a single point of failure and a high-value target. Your 12 guys may not be the most competent in the world, but that doesn't matter unless your data are the most valuable in the world. Someone attacking Azure might not be attacking you, but if they happen to get your data at the same time then selling it is just bonus money for them. Similarly, people are more likely to try to DDoS Azure or AWS than they are your in-house server.
Meltdown allowed you to dump the conte
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Meltdown allowed you to dump the contents of memory of other VMs on the same nodes as you...
I know of at least one other critical Azure vulnerability that would have let tenants in separate VMs on the same hyper visor futz with each other's memory addresses. That one never made it public though, because the researcher responsibly disclosed. The only reason I know about it is because a guy I grew up with was in the Incident response chain at Microsoft and helped to coordinate the patching.
I got Azure patch
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You have a pretty sharp tongue and a harsh attitude for an AC.
You seem like one of those trolls who expects perfection and is uncomfortable living in a world where nothing is perfect. Data breaches will happen to anybody. It is not a matter of if your systems are breached, but when.
Your future where things move back to private ownership are overlooking the increased scarcity of resources. Getting into, or staying in, the co-location business is only going to increase in cost.
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Or more accurately, your data is managed by people you hope are experts and whose main focus you hope is keeping everyone's data secure and hopefully reliable.
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It's your choice, you can trust a big/medium/small corp, or you can trust someone who you spent a few hours interviewing. Ultimately, to live in society, you need to trust people.
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I'm still trying to figure out the benefits of storing your data on multiple servers that you have no control over, and no idea where exactly they are. When you delete a file from the cloud, is it actually properly deleted? If the cloud is attacked, how long will it take for the parent company to admit they were hacked? I like the concept of cloud storage, but I have 0 trust or faith in that system at all.
It's not like the CxO or even any random director knows the answers to those questions even if their own IT are running things. However with an organization like Microsoft, there are SLAs, Business Agreements, HIPAA agreements, and all sorts of contracts that spell out exactly what happens if something goes wrong. With their own IT, they get a shrug and "It'll be fixed when it's fixed". One of the reasons MS has probably been doing so well is that in our experience, they are willing to sign those agreements
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> However with an organization like Microsoft, there are SLAs
Has anyone actually asked them what the SLA's are? I did in a meeting with the rep, I simply asked what the guaranteed uptime was on the O365 service. Considering it would be taking over all business functions from email to document storage.
The answer was "We guarantee a 99% uptime" My next question was "99 point what? 99.9%, 99.99%, 99.999%?" Nope just a 99% uptime. IT management ignored me when I suggested that 99% was way to low and signed t
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"servers that you have no control over..."
And while you are at it, give me the name of the executive who will take FULL RESPONSIBILITY for the security of my data. No, not the guy in the mailroom, the guy with the million dollar salary.
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Nope.
Back in the day, they cared about their older software and compatibility. They released a (free) package that made Office 2000-2003 able to read and write .docx, .xlsx, .pptx, etc files (2007 and later).
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True, but it became increasingly annoying to share between those different formats for multiple reasons. And MS was not always friendly across products: VB6 customers were left holding the bag, as VB-NET had too many differences to be auto-translate-able.
We will rake you over hotter coals than ever b4! (Score:5, Interesting)
This is truly an excellent opportunity to make money off of charging people a monthly fee for what used to be a fairly affordable one-time purchase. Sad that the big thing Microsoft is pumped about is a stale word processor and spreadsheet package. Satya's idea of innovation is a payment plan almost nobody actually likes.
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Yep. The only real message in that headline is that it's overpriced.
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Next up: Windows 10
Pretty soon there's going to be an "Insert credit card to continue" nag screen on every Windows 10 machine.
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Affordable? MS Office for businesses was $700-1200/user depending on your licensing model and often you didn't even get CAL's for your Exchange and other servers, even the home edition was like $100-200. Even if you had 10,000 licenses or more, you still were on the hook for ~$2-3M/year for Microsoft licensing.
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...and often you didn't even get CAL's for your Exchange and other servers....
CAL's were my first major indicator back in the late 80's/early 90's that Microsoft's customers really were stupendous morons. They paid a TON of money for software they weren't actually allowed to use in any meaningful respect.
Microsoft: That will be $1200, please.
Customer: How many users will your software support?
Microsoft: That depends on how much more money you pay us.
Customer: What? I just paid you $1200!
Microsoft: You paid for the right to pay us, not for right to use the software.
Customer: Oh, ok
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Sad that the big thing Microsoft is pumped about is a stale word processor and spreadsheet package.
Satya will fix that when he has enough users running cloud software with any component that resides on a PC being frequently updated. Release a whole bunch of ''improvements'' that just happen to require a change to the file format - things that really matter ... thus making problems for Libreoffice. 6 months later once Libreoffice has caught up; do it again; then again. Eventually most people will give up with Libreoffice. Yes: the EU will sue Microsoft and say that its file formats must be documented, but
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Obviously you never bought Office.
A year of O365 is around $100. A full blown standalone version of Office (yes, you can buy those, the cards actually are right where the O365 cards are - l
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> You get the latest version of Office
And that's the problem. 2013 was recently removed as a download option which means you can no longer run Office on anything but 7 with the latest SP and later. The next version of Office that is going to be released and that will be the only allowed version to install from Office 365 will only work with 10.
Outlook 2007 can't even connect to outlook.office.com any longer. Microsoft dropped support for it last November and about a month ago, our users were no longer
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And if you are a student taking certain "IT" courses (ie, any programming, networking, or desktop/server OS class at the tech college I work for) and you can download ISOs and a personal license key (not time limited, etc) for the OS, Office, Visual Studio, etc. via MS "Imagine". Tuition for that one course would be about $300 for an in-state resident...
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Yes, the Office is the same - you download the same software and can use it offline.
It's also worth noting that the O365 subscription gives you access to the Windows, Mac, Android and iOS versions. Unfortunately, my employer set it up in a stupid way. If I use the web version then I'm redirected to a web page run by our org that handles the authentication, but for the mobile apps I have to type in my credentials directly to the app (which is then sent to our servers for authentication). This would be fine, except that they don't let me set a different password for that and the systems t
Insert MICROS~1 advert on the Microsoft slashdot (Score:5, Insightful)
Instead of paying the once for the software, you'll be paying a yearly rent into perpetuity. Does anyone here remember when this was a technology forum?
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We used to be engineers during the early days of Slashdot. We have all now been promoted to the management.
Re: Insert MICROS~1 advert on the Microsoft slashd (Score:2)
You never paid once for Ms office. Not since it went to windows
You paid $350 every 3-6 years or you got lucky and got a three year with your $1500 new computer that was also replaced every 3-6 years.
You always paid for office. Now you pay byonth or year for it. It works. It also allows rivals to slip in as you start charging enough that instead of a once every thing 3-6 year write off able expense it is a recurring expense. And reoccurring expenses are the first to get trimmed.
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'When companies transition from Microsoft's traditional licensing business to cloud-based subscriptions, it's "not a one-for-one move"' Instead of paying the once for the software, you'll be paying a yearly rent into perpetuity.
Most large businesse have/had a subscription, which cost quite a bit. Also, the O365 for business subscription cover a lot more than traditional Office. And nobody prevent you from purchasing the traditional licenses.
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What used to take several days (normally) to several months (when under audit) is now literally a few minutes work at any time.
It is significantly easier to justify costs to the CFO when it comes to budget time - $X/user times number of users.
You bet I like an annual user subscript
I use LibreOffice (Score:3, Insightful)
I used open office for several years and it closed on functionality.
Then there was the kerfuffle and I switched over to LibreOffice.
I have a legit full license to Microsoft office 2012. I never use it.
Re: I use LibreOffice (Score:3)
During the libre open office kerfuffle I just stopped using an to be ok f them. I didn't use them at home often enough to deal with in the the updates.
Switched to Google docs and sheets. Covers all of my needs and best yet I can work on stuff like bill paying during lunch at work.
MS office does have some useful features I use at work (index match in arrays) but for home that just isn't needed.
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I use google docks (on OneDrive) but I have many documents which are hundreds of pages long with many tables and graphics. I haven't found google docs to be a good fit. Plus, I'm an old-timer and I like having the executable for any critical software i use available. Google could drop google docs tomorrow. They probably won't. But they could.
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I love LibreOffice Writer and Calc. I use both of them quite extensively.
That being said, I'm not a fan of Impress (their PowerPoint clone). I give presentations to lay people and Impress doesn't have as many WOW features as Keynote (my presentation software of choice).
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Who sold you *that* license? There's no such thing as Office 2012. It went from 2010 to 2013.
It's a corporate license. It's probably 2010 but I purchased it for $20 in 2012 as part of a program that microsoft offers to employees at large customers. It installed. It sits on my machine unused.
Fuck you,Satya. (Score:2, Insightful)
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This... has nothing to do with LibreOffice. O365 is an entire set of enterprise IT management and productivity tools. This would be like you telling Home Depot they're worthless because someone gave you a hammer for free.
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Blacklist (Score:2)
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basically no, openoffice is mostly dead. Apache did try to pick it up, but most developers moved to libreoffice and even release security patch for openoffice took several months, if ever released.
Is someone is still using openoffice, he/she/it is basically using a several year old office without updates. Just move on to libreoffice already!
Libreoffice in the other hand had lot of development, new features, bug fixes and cleanup (they finally removed old trash that SUN kept still from staroffice and even DO
The Joy of Rent-Seeking (Score:1)
Rent-seeking [wikipedia.org].
Translation to plain english: (Score:5, Insightful)
When companies transition from Microsoft's traditional licensing business to cloud-based subscriptions, it's "not a one-for-one move," Nadella told Morgan Stanley analyst Keith Weiss
What is means: We were foolish to have sold perpetual licenses for just a one time hit. People who can move out have already moved out of MsOffice. Those who have not moved out, could not so. So we have them by their balls. We are going to make them all pay month after month to get access to their own data. Dont worry about users holding on to their old licenses. We make life hell for them, and they will eventually succumb and move to cloud and pay us our due share, our daily bread. It might be their data, but they stored it in our formats. Now they are our prisoners, we will never release them, but continue to bleed them dry.
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...OneDrive is easy to disable.
For now. Don't think for a fucking second that will continue to be allowed forever.
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You can still save locally without cloud-fucking your documents, even if you pay monthly. OneDrive is easy to disable. ^H^H^H^H^H^H^H^H^H^H^H^H^H^H^H It is easy to make the user interface say OneDrive is disabled.
Fixed it for you.
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Formats are "open." I'm not even sure if MS's own implementation matches the written spec.
Re: Translation to plain english: (Score:5, Insightful)
Why pay once when you can just keep paying (Score:2)
I refuse to buy subscription software. I'm sure its a win win for macroshaft though.
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he's making a statement about the heritage of MS's CEO (and seemingly 70% of their engineers)
Really? Because.... (Score:3)
Mine has been trying to connect for the last 30 minutes without success. This happens often everyday.
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openoffice is dead for several years already, switch to libreoffice
They need to stop botching upgrades (Score:2)
A client had *months* of problems because of them constantly screwing around with their licensing back end. It needs to stop.
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I'm sure Microsoft would fix that problem if they could. They're preventing paying customers from accessing software that they paid for. They can't even fix the problem where Windows loses its activation.
We've had nothing but problems with o365 migration (Score:5, Informative)
...at one of the biggest companies in the world.
I'm an IT supporter there, and we're currently drowning in migration issues from the old system to o365. Profiles messing up, shared mails not working properly, license issues prohibiting our users from reading the mails and thus working. Literally thousands of calls, hundreds just at my department every day about Outlook o365 migration issues.
Get it working before you brag!
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We migrated to Office 365 last week. Most people still can't read email despite the fact we hired someone Microsoft recommended to help. The company is named SkyKick, and their office is near us here in Seattle. They were nice enough to send someone to our office to try to help, but I don't think they've been able to get anyone working yet. They seem sharp, but the migration has been a disaster.
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What is your problem with O365? We moved ~5000 global users out of Exchange and into Exchange Online over a year ago at this point and it works great. We have a pretty complex Active Directory forest, with multiple domains.
Sounds like you guys borked your transition. The technology itself is solid. Way better than managing the Exchange infrastructure ourselves.
We did a phased rollout over the course of 18 months.
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Not only is it unlikely that he works for one of the biggest companies in the world, even if he does, they are blowing it big time.
We are only a mid-sized enterprise with ~5000 licenses from Microsoft. They have a whole squad of employees dedicated to our account. We have dedicated engineers and support escalation matrixes for the major technologies that we use (Skype for Business, O365 / Exchange and Azure). Anything I need a resource for, I can just email our account rep and he gets me connected with s
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Don't be so sure. I worked for one of the 5 biggest IT companies, and they thought Lotus Notes was an enterprise email solution.
To be fair, it wasn't that bad at email, especially if you were owned the platform, ie: IBM. It was used a fair bit in the enterprise before Microsoft had Outlook ready in '97.
I have Office 365 administration exp on my resume. (Score:2)
An I get a *TON* of inquires from employers all over the US about it, even though I've been on perm disability for the last 2 years.
That's good news (Score:2)
MS Office "compatibility" (Score:2)
Is expensive (Score:2)
A company that I'm consulting for currently has 28 e1 licenses. They pay nearly $300 a month. The only feature they use is email. That's it. They are paying far too much.
I'm setting up (currently nearing finalzation and runs well) a Linux postfix email server with dovecot (imap and pop3), spam assassin, virus scanning, backup, a additional web interface, all without local accounts. The server is configured to handle multiple domains.
In my own business I have this set up with it constantly running for th