Microsoft is on a roll, the mantra of \u201cAgile\u201d is in place and Satya\u2019s troops are delivering changes, new products and a whole bunch more at an unprecedented pace.\u00a0 Some days it can be a bit overwhelming as the announcements just seem to steamroll along.\u00a0 But that is OK as you don\u2019t have to wrap your head around everything and certainly not all at once.\u00a0 The point is to realize that Office 365 has become a platform for targeted services delivery and that all sorts of tools and apps are being plumbed into it.\u00a0 Azure lets you \u201croll your own\u201d while Office 365 boxes up the best of the user facing bits.<\/p>\n
Not so long ago people questioned Microsoft\u2019s plans and directions for Office 365 (or BPOS as it was originally known) as it didn\u2019t feel all that polished.\u00a0 Yes, email was up in the Cloud along with some other apps but it was not really anything special.\u00a0 Fast forward to May 2015 and the transformation has been astounding.\u00a0 Back in the BPOS days or even the point at which the transition to the Office 365 name was made I was a doubting Thomas and was not convinced there was value in Microsoft\u2019s proposition.\u00a0 Today I question why people would not want<\/em> to go to Office 365!\u00a0 Why would anyone want to try and match all of what it provides on-prem?<\/p>\n And while there are lots of user-facing changes that have appeared in the Office 365 ecosystem, there are many large changes and improvements that have happened in the backend.\u00a0 Some of the most appreciated changes that have been made as far as techies like myself are concerned are the massive improvements that have been made in tools like AADconnect (DirSync) that make it so\u00a0 much easier to link Office 365 (and Azure) with an on-prem AD.\u00a0 Concurrent with that are the changes made that allow the third-party tool providers to integrate their tools ever more closely so that things like migration tools work much more smoothly (important when you have a lot of mailboxes to migrate or SharePoint data to sling about).\u00a0 Oh, and let\u2019s not forget about all the effort that has been poured into the \u201capp\u201d infrastructure so that apps on iOS, Android and Windows Phone seamlessly access Office 365 data.\u00a0 These apps really underline the point that Office 365 is a delivery platform for almost any connected device regardless of the underlying OS.<\/p>\n And maybe that is the singular brilliance of Office 365; other Cloud platforms tend to aim themselves at the techies and the backend infrastructure and you could argue that Azure is part of this category.\u00a0 Office 365, on the other hand, focuses directly on the end user; everything that it provides save for the\u00a0 admin interfaces is really all about an immersive user experience.\u00a0 And while a cynic might argue that it\u2019s all about binding a user or an organization to a recurring revenue generating model of software licensing, I would argue that it has become so much more than that.\u00a0 Office 365 is becoming the de facto way to provide an always connected, extremely collaborative and very fluid platform for organizations of one to organizations of hundreds of thousands of users.<\/p>\n So don\u2019t feel bad if you don\u2019t know all of the things that Office 365 can do as chances are it\u2019s going to do something \u201cnew\u201d today or tomorrow that it didn\u2019t do yesterday.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"