Microsoft Will Block Desktop 'Office' Apps From 'Office 365' Services In 2020 (techradar.com) 217
An anonymous reader writes:
Microsoft is still encouraging businesses to rent their Office software, according to TechRadar. "In a bid to further persuade users of the standalone versions of Office to shift over to a cloud subscription (Office 365), Microsoft has announced that those who made a one-off purchase of an Office product will no longer get access to the business flavours of OneDrive and Skype come the end of the decade." PC World explains that in reality this affects very few users. "If you've been saving all of your Excel spreadsheets into your OneDrive for Business cloud, you'll need to download and move them over to a personal subscription -- or pony up for Office 365, as Microsoft really wants you to do."
Microsoft is claiming that when customers connect to Office 365 services using a legacy version of Office, "they're not enjoying all that the service has to offer. The IT security and reliability benefits and end user experiences in the apps is limited to the features shipped at a point in time. To ensure that customers are getting the most out of their Office 365 subscription, we are updating our system requirements." And in another blog post, they're almost daring people to switch to Linux. "Providing over three years advance notice for this change to Office 365 system requirements for client connectivity gives you time to review your long-term desktop strategy, budget and plan for any change to your environment."
In a follow-up comment, Microsoft's Alistair Speirs explained that "There is still an option to get monthly desktop updates, but we are changing the 3x a year update channel to be 2x a year to align closer to Windows 10 update model. We are trying to strike the right balance between agile, ship-when-ready updates and enterprise needs of predictability, reliability and advanced notice to validate and prepare."
Microsoft is claiming that when customers connect to Office 365 services using a legacy version of Office, "they're not enjoying all that the service has to offer. The IT security and reliability benefits and end user experiences in the apps is limited to the features shipped at a point in time. To ensure that customers are getting the most out of their Office 365 subscription, we are updating our system requirements." And in another blog post, they're almost daring people to switch to Linux. "Providing over three years advance notice for this change to Office 365 system requirements for client connectivity gives you time to review your long-term desktop strategy, budget and plan for any change to your environment."
In a follow-up comment, Microsoft's Alistair Speirs explained that "There is still an option to get monthly desktop updates, but we are changing the 3x a year update channel to be 2x a year to align closer to Windows 10 update model. We are trying to strike the right balance between agile, ship-when-ready updates and enterprise needs of predictability, reliability and advanced notice to validate and prepare."
Time to switch (Score:3, Informative)
If you run the other popular operating system, full installs of Pages, Numbers and Keynote come with it.
Re:Time to switch (Score:4, Insightful)
Why? If you have a desktop version of Office that you've already purchased you already have an office suite. It's the cloud storage you need to switch. Google Drive or Dropbox will happily take your money and cost a lot less than 365 to boot. Well, Google drive will, Dropbox seems to have missed the whole "I need more storage than the free version but don't want to pay $100 a year for this crap when I won't use 90% of it" boat...
Re: (Score:3)
It feels like this is intended to spark some sort of frothing outrage, but it doesn't sound all that unreasonable: So... the free business OneDrive and Skype service that came with their product ends when mainstream support for that product also ends three years from now? Yeah, well... okay? Pony up and pay for a service to store your documents online somewhere. It's really not all that expensive. And generally speaking, it's stupid to count on a "free" cloud service lasting forever. Hell, even *paid*
Re: (Score:2)
Exactly right. This whole writeup is pitched like it's an eeeeevil plot by MS, but I don't see it that way.
A penny saved (Score:2)
Last month I paid 10 cents. S3 is stupidly cheap for storing documents and source code backups, since that takes up very little space.
ARE YOU MADE OF MONEY? You could have paid 1 cent if you had used Glacier instead. As long as you don't plan to be on a hurry to restore your backup, because I'm pretty sure Glacier restore is a team of interns who take the bus to go off-site and fetch backup tapes. That's how slow it is. But at 1/10 of the price of S3 which is already dirt cheap, it's to be expected.
Re: (Score:2)
Larger enterprises do. This Microsoft initiative isn't targeting large enterprises as they already know that Office 365 + cloud is a total non-starter for big companies due to audit concerns and a raft of other issues, plus larger companies have some interesting bulk licensing negotiated with Microsoft.
This is firmly aimed at the smaller companies, under 100 people and smaller. Big enough they have doc sync issues and IT headaches with licensing control but small enough they can't easily roll their own so
Re: Time to switch (Score:4, Interesting)
I can think of several Fortune 500 companies that use Office 365 based on info from friends and family that work there. I wouldn't be surprised if OneDrive was disabled for some of those users but many big companies have bought into renting Office, hosted Exchange, and hosted Skype for Business.Office 365 Enterprise E5 tops out at $35 per person per month and I am guessing gets much cheaper for large enterprises. That is dirt cheap for the value you are getting. My company was recently acquired and we went from Office 365 everything back to on-premise because that is the way the acquiring company runs their business and every single person complains about the capabilities and reliability that we lost in the transition.
Re: (Score:3)
I'm curious how big companies justify anything over $5 a month.
Most companies of any size have virtualization which almost always means that running Exchange amounts to software licensing and a fairly thin amount of admin time.
A single Exchange server should scale to 500 users pretty easily -- at $35 month, you're making a $175,000 commitment or $525,000 over 3 years. The office and Exchange licensing for on-prem isn't $525,000.
I know some organizations have struggled with Exchange reliability, but I've wo
Re: Time to switch (Score:4, Insightful)
Re: (Score:3)
Re: (Score:2)
However....backup, anti-virus, spam filtering, and a DR solution drives up the cost very quickly.
The marginal cost of backup and DR when you're *already* doing those things for an on-prem server environment is pretty close to zero, and if you're already virtualized and have a virtual-oriented backup software you probably already have DR integrated into your backup. AV and anti-spam are almost always done best these days by a third party service and the good ones do both anyway.
From the numbers I've run, it usually is cheaper to do it on prem above about 50 users with a 3 year benchmark. If you time t
Re: (Score:2)
However....backup, anti-virus, spam filtering, and a DR solution drives up the cost very quickly.
The marginal cost of backup and DR when you're *already* doing those things for an on-prem server environment is pretty close to zero, and if you're already virtualized and have a virtual-oriented backup software you probably already have DR integrated into your backup. AV and anti-spam are almost always done best these days by a third party service and the good ones do both anyway.
From the numbers I've run, it usually is cheaper to do it on prem above about 50 users with a 3 year benchmark. If you time the upgrade right, you can probably get 5 years out of it without falling more than a rev behind and cut the 50 user number way down.
It's pretty obvious Microsoft is heading subscription-only for everything. Since 2013, Exchange has lost much of its GUI which I think has been a way to scare on-prem admins away. They will ultimately either price on prem high enough that only a few compliance/security focused large organizations will consider it or support hybrid only (meaning you're paying for O365, used or not).
Cloud is about permanent vendor-lock in and rent-seeking, not economics. The marginal cost of a 5-9s commercial data center for hosting cloud services is greater than the marginal savings to users, which is why hosted systems always end up being so expensive unless you're doing something really trivial like a static web site.
You guys are somethign else. You bashed WIndows NT and then called Windows Server for years for not having a CLI. Hey look at Unix we do not have to sit in front of the server to admin it etc. Now MS has powershell and it is BEH WHERE IS THE GUI?! Exchange is a very complex project because many organizations have complex uses. If your admin can't handle scripting and commands then he is incompetent. If you are paying someone +$75,000 a year he or she should be a master at that price and have years of experi
Re: (Score:2)
We are a school that used to run exchange - we've run every version from 5.5 to 2010. It worked well for us and academic licensing is pretty cheap.
However....backup, anti-virus, spam filtering, and a DR solution drives up the cost very quickly.
Google apps was a very easy decision since schools get unlimited storage for free. Google also gives academic accounts the same SLA that businesses get - pretty nice.
Running Microsoft Exchange is cheap - running it properly isn't.
So basically you no longer have backup or DR. Read the fine print or call a Google rep, and you'll realize it. They will tell you outright that even with Google Apps (or G Suite) you need your own backup/DR, all they have is a lightweight recycle bin where deleted stuff lives for like 2 weeks. And you can't restore more than a handful of accounts at once.
You're unlikely to lose emails (although it can happen) but if there's a rogue element in your organization that goes around and deletes stuff, you're fuck
Re: (Score:2)
I'm curious how big companies justify anything over $5 a month.
Most companies of any size have virtualization which almost always means that running Exchange amounts to software licensing and a fairly thin amount of admin time.
A single Exchange server should scale to 500 users pretty easily -- at $35 month, you're making a $175,000 commitment or $525,000 over 3 years. The office and Exchange licensing for on-prem isn't $525,000.
I know some organizations have struggled with Exchange reliability, but I've worked in the managed services and consulting space and the vast majority of on-prem installs I've worked with have been extremely reliable and problems have usually been the result of some really bad admin decisions.
I've laid the costs out side by side for customers who have run on-prem, including admin costs, and almost none have chosen 365.
THanks to the horrible US healthcare system and high corporate tax rates a good Exchange admin who is worth $80,000 a year costs $170,000 easily in 401K, healthcare costs, and taxes for the employer. The cost of energy for the server could easily be $10,000 a year per server. Our former MDF cost 1 million a year of electricity at our site of ust 1,100 users.
The race to the bottom with falling wages for mellinials and robotic automation is because of healthcare costs which keep going up 10% per year. So to t
Re: (Score:2)
A single Exchange server should scale to 500 users pretty easily -- at $35 month, you're making a $175,000 commitment or $525,000 over 3 years. The office and Exchange licensing for on-prem isn't $525,000.
Seems that you'd spend that $175k/year just on your administrator, let alone also the actual hardware, power, data center space, etc. And you get server storage space too with OneDrive for Business and the user can manage their own permissions. Then it also includes Office suite plus user options to install on their personal computers and mobiles devices. Skype for Business works even if other things do work better, you have it also for everybody in the company. Add in that it is probably all tied into most
Re: (Score:2)
Dude it is 2017. Wordperfect and Lotus 123 lost. Deal with it. The world runs on Microsoft. You can't have your sales team making documents misformatting in potential clients computers. Customers make custom Sharepoint sites and use MS teams to arrange things.
I am not saying this as a super MS fanboy. I am just stating reality. If Libreoffice was around in the early days of the internet in the 1990s maybe this wouldn't be a thing, but the office runs on MS and Intune, Office, Skype, Sharepoint, MS project,
Re: (Score:2)
Nothing last forever. Windos died on the phone, one the server, on the web, on TVs, on tablets and is dying on budget notebooks. The desktop market is shrinking and M$ cant sell new products because they are loathed as a company. The world runs on people not on M$. All M$ software could disappear and the world would restructure around Linus with a month.
Office run on what ever software they started with for as long as they can, because change costs money, problem is M$ continually forces change to generate
Re: (Score:2)
I think you're the clueless one if you don\t know that there's no money in consumer software. The big bucks are in the enterprise. Why do you think even Github, Docker and others have paid enterprise versions? Because someone has to pay the bills, and it's not you and your twitters.
As for "Internet Servers", for the public facing stuff Microsoft is basically printing money with Azure, and for the enterprise it depends on the size, the crown goes to either IBM, Oracle or Microsoft.
So look at the stuff that y
Re: (Score:2)
Azure runs Linux VMs clueless one (and Windows, I know.)
Ok maybe it'd be best for you to dial down a bit the "clueless" thing, you're not even doing it right.
When it comes to Azure, whether a company pays $0.25 per hour to run a Linux or Windows server, the money goes to the same place. I honestly don't know why someone would choose Windows Server but it's apparently a thing since Windows Server licensing went up 46% last year. A fair chunk of that is coming from AWS customers.
Re: (Score:2)
Re: (Score:2)
If you run the other popular operating system, full installs of Pages, Numbers and Keynote come with it.
As usual the anti MS hate is in the story. The title is wrong.
Yes MS plans to keep desktop versions of their apps. What MS is doing is requiring an Office 365 account to use Skype for Business and OneDrive when support ends in 2020 for Office 2016.
The desktop apps are here to stay folks
Re: Time to switch (Score:3, Insightful)
This arrogance will be all people need to make them figure out Office's extra features aren't worth paying for. Libreoffice and AbiWord offer what 99% of people actually use.
Re: (Score:2)
Re: (Score:2)
You're a troll, but you're correct about LibreOffice.
Libre/Star/Open Office all suck ass for anything remotely complex.
MS Office isn't going away. We've only been able to transition a small group of our users to Google Docs / etc. because their use is extremely limited and we in fact wanted to limit them more.
Re: (Score:3)
Your whole company must be in the 1% of the population that uses ALL the features of MS Office. What business are you in? I'm not asking the company, just the industry, since that is really weird.
What you said is a widespread fallacy.
No one use all the features of MS Office, but many people use a subset of features that are only available on MS Office. The same thing can be said of similarly complex software like the Adobe suite, IDEs, 3D modelers, etc...
These software are complex because everyone have specific needs and the software need to address most of them in the easiest way possible. Usually commercial software is better than free software in this area.
Re: (Score:3)
I don't disagree with your observation at all. I think that Microsoft created a lot of fill in solutions that were baked into workflow over the 90's/00's (abuses of Excel as a poor man's database).
Most of the people I know that "must have" Excel are people that have inherited (or grew into) a position where they'd be a lot happier if they'd have picked up *SQL and tossed some of their learning curve toward php/python. However, Microsoft did something "right" with Office... they let the end user build com
Re: (Score:2)
I agree with everything you say except the "work with my hands" part. I think it's one of those things that gets old real quick, like quitting a corporate career to open a cupcake shop.
It can be damaging for the soul to deal with hard-linked Excel worksheets or orphaned .gdoc files for too long, but I don't know if you would have really enjoyed operating a forklift or a backhoe for the last 25 years.
Here's my take on this: if one is not already doing a lot of manual labor outside of business hours, one is n
Re: (Score:2)
Your whole company must be in the 1% of the population that uses ALL the features of MS Office. What business are you in? I'm not asking the company, just the industry, since that is really weird.
What you said is a widespread fallacy. No one use all the features of MS Office, but many people use a subset of features that are only available on MS Office.
Perhaps they do, but usually because the features are there and not because they really need them. They are a Microsoft method of locking people in.
I work in an engineering office. All the "office" work on a PC that I and the others do here could be done just as well in Notepad and a stripped-down email app.
Re: (Score:2)
Re: (Score:2)
So what (Score:2)
Actually I've used it for a Master's dissertation and am currently using it for long university essays.
So the guy is right, you haven't used it much. One can write a Master's (or Slave's) dissertation in Notepad or vi. Or even in a writers app like Focuswriter (which I really like). The woman who wrote Fifty Shades of Grey did most of it on her Blackberry and I bet it's longer than your long university essays.
But when you have to write countless documents with repetitive patterns or need more advanced features like linked content or indexes or mail merge, forget about LibreOffice or OpenOffice, they're like
Re: (Score:2)
There's an ethical dimension to my decision too, when Microsoft changes some of their business practices, I'll be glad to change my mind.
Why pay the Microsoft tax? (Score:4, Interesting)
This is being accepted: Windows 10 is possibly the worst spyware ever made. [networkworld.com] Quote: "Buried in the service agreement is permission to poke through everything on your PC."
So, I'm guessing Microsoft managers think, "That worked. We will try another abuse."
One thing I've learned over the years is that Slashdot commenters are generally not good at reacting to abuse. Slashdot commenters make excuses, or react to abuse weakly. Also, for many Slashdot commenters there is a conflict of interest: They make more money if Windows is more difficult to administer and use.
Slowly increasing the number and severity of abuses causes many people to make multiple excuses, effectively accepting Microsoft's abusiveness.
However, Microsoft managers seem to lack social ability. The abusiveness of many of the features of Windows 10 are like a multi-billion-dollar advertising campaign that very effectively says, "Dislike Microsoft products". One of the many examples: Trying to imitate Google and sell "Apps", but to business users that don't want employees distracted.
One possible solution: All countries could support ReactOS [reactos.org] so that the Windows OS can be eliminated.
No company should be allowed to have a virtual monopoly! Companies that are routinely abusive should be re-organized or eliminated.
Quote from the parent comment: "I've been using a combination of Google Apps and LibreOffice for years, never looked back and don't miss MS at all. Several of the businesses I consult for have switched entirely to Google Apps..."
Several years ago, I spent several hours writing something in Microsoft Word. Later I discovered that Microsoft Word was not able to open its own file! Luckily, I could open the file in Libre Office.
The parent comment is correct. Let's find other methods of doing our work. Don't rely on a habitual abuser.
Let's have a multi-national effort to improve Libre Office, especially the somewhat sloppy and limited user interface.
Why should all the countries in the world pay the Microsoft tax? The United States was founded because of refusing to pay an abusive tax.
Re: (Score:2)
So the proper response is to join the NRA and come out with all guns blazing? Didn't work out well for Jimmy Cliff, did it (I here, but I disappear)?
Come on, we have all switched to Linux, moaned about Unity till it was scrapped, and use LibreOffice or Google. I have had Linux on my desktop since 1776. Looks like we are doing reasonably well.
YMMV
Common issue: Finding the most negative response (Score:2)
Why say something extremely negative and worthless, while ignoring suggested solutions? That's one of the ways Slashdot commenters don't handle abuse well.
Here are 2 solutions I mentioned in my grandparent comment:
1) One possible solution: All countries could support ReactOS [reactos.org] so that the Windows OS can be eliminated.
2) No company should be allowed to have a virtual monopoly! Companies that are routinely abusive should
Re: (Score:2)
Replace one monopolist with another. Sounds great.
File formats and interfaces are what need to be demonopolised, not particular commodity applications.
Re:Why pay the Microsoft tax? (Score:5, Insightful)
One thing I've learned over the years is that Slashdot commenters are generally not good at reacting to abuse. Slashdot commenters make excuses, or react to abuse weakly.
I see the last 20 years have done nothing to dampen your idealism, good for you but maybe an ounce of reality wouldn't hurt? Back then your data was local, you had the executable and the only thing you didn't have was the source code to inspect it. Even though things like email went from your server to their server instead of peer to peer, things were pretty distributed and decentralized. Having access to the source code was mostly about being able to fix and extend it, not that it did something nasty.
Not only have consumers ignored open source solutions, they've gone totally the other way. Much of their data lives in the cloud, where they have no control of what's done with it. They use huge, centralized services like Facebook that collects a ton of data. Auto-updating devices download and install new executable code all the time and often rely on online servers. People don't care that they're being tracked and in many cases even accuse those who object of having something to hide. They sign away all rights in mile-long EULAs without thought.
We've ranted. We've raged. We've raised the banners and tried to proclaim YotLD many times. XPs online activation in 2001. Slammer & friends in 2003. Vista in 2006. "Trusted Computing" sometime late 2000s. Windows 8 in 2012. Windows 10 in 2015. Stealth telemetry in all VS apps in 2016. I'm sure there's many more things I've forgotten. I'm sure there's bad things about Apple, Google, Adobe and many others. We've raged out. It's like "OMG OMG Microsoft is... wait, what's the point? Why is anyone going to listen now, when they never have in the past?"
They earn billions of dollars that way. And in between screwing us over they sometime make pretty good software, so yeah... maybe open source is more efficient but one idealist versus a hundred paid developers is unfair teams. So I run Win7 and I got an iPhone. Should it have been Linux and a rooted Android phone? Maybe. But like I said, raged out. If I can't even stand the hassle myself, it's pretty hard to ask anyone else to fight a fight I feel is pretty hopeless. Pretty sure I'm not the only disillusioned ex-revolutionary here.
Gov. leaders unsually have no technical knowledge. (Score:2)
The average person has no technical knowledge. Companies like Microsoft are using that ignorance to abuse their customers.
We have technical knowledge. We could teach government leaders what needs to be done. In general, almost all government leaders are extremely ignorant about technology. They need a lot of help.
"We've ranted. We've raged."
"Ranting" and "raging" is infantile behavior.
Instead, prepare
Re: (Score:2)
"Ranting" and "raging" is infantile behavior.
Hyperbole detection check: Failed. We have eloquently tried to express our concerns and displeasure with this development among mainstream users to gain broader support and failed.
Instead, prepare a set of laws and regulations that we recommend. Get the process started.
And the first thing any politician will ask is whether anyone wants this. The industry doesn't want it? People don't want it? If there is neither money nor votes behind it the proposal is dead on arrival. Besides what would these laws and regulations do, outlaw services? Agreeing to the Windows 10 EULA isn't even close to the stu
Another example of negativity: Quoted. (Score:2)
No fighting. Organize sensible change.
Slashdot comment shows one reaction to abuse: (Score:2)
"You're the laughingstock of the whole town."
"You're middle-aged now, alone and shunned."
"Your "call to arms" is a joke and we will laugh at it, as always."
"And you will end up with your pants pulled over your head and stuck heads-down in a trash can."
As I said in my comment that started this discussion of Slashdot reactions to abuse (+5), [slashdot.org] people who comment about abuse often don't respond in a manner guided by logic. Commenters often use these avoidanc
Re: (Score:2)
Re: (Score:3)
Skype for business isn't Skype anyway, it's just the name they grabbed. On the backside it's still the crappy Lync.
And we are using it where I work, I'm not sure how Microsoft will handle enterprise solutions when it comes to this strategy.
Also - putting all your docs online is a risk - it means that M$ can read all your documents and get access to all your business strategies.
Sure (Score:2)
Also - putting all your docs online is a risk - it means that M$ can read all your documents and get access to all your business strategies.
Really? You think Microsoft cares about business strategies stored in your Word documents? They make $20 billions in profit every year. What strategy are they going to steal from someone's $10/month cloud account.
And supposing that it wasn't encrypted, how would that work exactly, since there's millions of documents? They would use Bing to find documents that have the words "profit" or "secret" in them? Or rent Watson from IBM to AI it?
Unlike Google they're not even mining FREE email accounts for ads. I sus
Re: (Score:2)
Also - putting all your docs online is a risk - it means that M$ can read all your documents and get access to all your business strategies.
We've looked at cloud services and do use Office 365. One thing that Microsoft really stands out from many of the other cloud services is their willingness to sign business agreements as well as HIPAA agreements and follow those regulations as given to them by our legal. It seems that they'll sign off on what we require of them and be up and running using their services before any of the others, including smaller application vendors activity trying to sell us their wares, can hash out the agreements and sig
Libreoffice is a thing (Score:5, Interesting)
free too.
Re: (Score:3, Insightful)
Examples (Score:2)
I think they did some years ago, it's called "git".
Sparkle Share is an example of document tracking built aroudn "git".
Also there are examples such as ownCloud / NextCloud.
This last one is getting so much popular that it has seen official deployment in some universities.
(e.g.: Switch is providing country-wide installation for Swiss Universities)
Re: (Score:2)
OwnCloud is almost there. IMHO, the devs should have a team which focuses on packaging a complete "appliance" images like pfSense capable of managing the storage subsytem from a web gui.
When I last looked at it, someone had done this themselves but it took some shell work to manage the OS storage side of things, certificates, etc.
There are canned EC2 instances, but for storage intensive versions the cost is approaching or over $1/hr.
Re: (Score:2)
Re:Libreoffice is a thing (Score:5, Insightful)
That would sorta defeat the purpose (Score:3)
Re: (Score:3, Insightful)
Re: Libreoffice is a thing (Score:2)
Re: (Score:2)
Re:Libreoffice is a thing (Score:5, Funny)
There is only one true language
Yup. BASIC.
Re: (Score:2)
Cobol FTW!
Re:Libreoffice is a thing (Score:5, Informative)
Needs Java. That's a show stopper
Not needs. It has some extra Java doodads that you could install had you a nasty mental breakdown.
On Debian, it's not even a Recommends but a mere Suggests. On Windows, the checkbox is ticked by default but you can clear it.
Re: Libreoffice is a thing (Score:2)
Re: (Score:2)
Not sure why it was down-modded, but its completely true: LibreOffice has so many bugs and strange quirks that it drives you crazy!
Something as simple as bullet points and modifying paragraphs spacing or adjusting the indentation on the ruler is enough to reveal its many flaws. I spent hours just playing with those settings trying to get the layout right on a basic document (CV), and although I eventually fixed it. I vowed never again to torture myself and just go back to MS Office.
At least I can say that I
Re: (Score:2)
"Something as simple as bullet points and modifying paragraphs spacing or adjusting the indentation on the ruler is enough to reveal its many flaws"
How strange. That's exactly what I could have said about Word.
And at least I can figure out where to find things in LibreOffice, whereas I can never tell where anything will be hidden in Word's 'Ribbon'.
Re: (Score:2)
Yet another reason to go FOSS (Score:2)
Could someone remind me of the actual benefits to using Office nowadays compared to a FOSS alternative.
Aside from the fact that Office has essentially taken older files hostage with propriety file formats.
Re: (Score:2)
Clippy? Lol
Re: (Score:2)
Best practice for business continuity is to use a product with a support contract behind it.
Yes it rarely breaks, and local IT usually fixes it via StackExchange or Social.Msdn searches. But when you don't have an answer, you can say your admin is on the phone with support, and it's no longer your job on the line.
I realise that most linux advocates don't experience nor understand this type of Fortune 500 corporate culture, but this is the decision engine for Microsoft's terrible direction in most things. Pu
Re: Yet another reason to go FOSS (Score:2, Insightful)
You're forgetting the cost of the workstation license, plus the license to allow the workstation to communicate with the server. Then there's the exchange licenses and the Outlook licenses... Then the license to allow the client and sever to communicate. Follow that up with av licenses, oh, don't forget the 'advanced' CALs for a lot of exchange features. Then there are support incident costs because windows admins are incompetent. Oh, and time to buy new hardware because MS is preventing you from getti
Re: (Score:3)
Every single thing you said about licenses and CALs goes out the window with Office 365 enterprise subscriptions because it is rented by the month. And if you don't like Windows it also runs on Mac and subsets run on iOS and Android.
Misinformation (Score:2)
Re: (Score:2, Interesting)
Re: (Score:2)
No, Microsoft Fucks You! If you have to have every single feature that Office offers then you are their bitch. Admit it, bend over, get in position and spread those cheeks. Otherwise you can opt for something else and be free.
Re: (Score:3)
And yet, people still use this shit.
How badly does he have to beat you before you finally admit that no, he doesn't love you. Not really.
Re: (Score:2)
The mentally deficient boobs will always be with us.
Re: (Score:3)
Office365 costs at most $40 per month. For a small business, it is more like $15 to $20 per month. What kind of business are you running where you can't afford that? Honestly, most small businesses SAVE a great deal of money with Office 365 because they don't need bumbling administrators.
Re: (Score:2)
HIPAA compliance needs a plan, confidentiality, and custody. Using cloud anything where the host can see what is going in, out, through, or stored in their own systems is not HIPAA compliant in regard to PHI. Can anyone see data that is being sent or stored in Office365 that is not explicitly allowed to do so by the patient? If that answer is yes then Office365 isn't complaint.
The answer is yes, but why let the law we are discussing stand in the way when you can post an unseasoned falsehood and get modded up instead?
The answer is that I work at a hospital that is using Office 365 for all employees and there are others I know of in the area also. Microsoft's Office 365 is HIPAA compliant and for cloud services they are more willing to sign off on those business agreements and HIPAA forms than others. The only issue was that their mobile Outlook app was not HIPAA compliant because it stored the password someplace it shouldn't. That was fixed a while back. Please AC, can you just stop trolling us? It's not like you even n
Office programs Office365 (Score:3)
Outlook e-mail in the Office365 "cloud" is horrid and featureless. Click to Flag a message? It dutifully flags it with NO OPTIONS for setting a reminder popup or anything. Useless! I'm sticking with real Outlook running on my computer under my control.
I'm glad all these nitrogen-cooled 53 terahertz PCs are becoming little more than dumb terminals for whatever crap a web programmer sees fit to jam down our browser's throat.
Re: (Score:2)
PCs? Wow oldschool. I read about those on a magazine once.
Re: (Score:2)
A magazine?? Isn't that like a blog, but on shiny paper?
Commerical, and only affects current Office 365 (Score:5, Informative)
Read the real story [office.com], not some stupid 3rd party blog.
Firstly, this is ONLY commercial Office 365 cloud services -- essentially, OneDrive For Business (effectively hosted SharePoint) - not to be confused with OneDrive for consumer (completely different) and hosted exchange. CONSUMER SERVICES ARE UNAFFECTED.
If I am understanding this correctly, the ONLY people affected are companies that [a] paying for Office 365 subscriptions (otherwise they would have no access to Office 365's hosted services); but also [b] not using the Office 365 included distribution of the Office software.
The push here is to get enterprises moving and use the Office 365 version of Office instead of whatever old version they bought as a one off -- you don't get to use Outlook 2013 to talk to Office365 exchange, you use the 'evergreen' Office 365 version of Outlook. Any enterprise that's simply using the 'current click to run' version of Office 365 is unaffected.
Consumers and people not using Office 365 services are NOT AFFECTED. People with Office 365 subscriptions using the Office 365 software are not affected. This is absolutely no different to any other service with a dedicated client that insists your client software is kept up to date. Netflix makes the exact same demand, for example, and nobody complains about THAT.
Absolutely nobody is required to pay any money for this -- you are either already paying for the new version (with your office 365 subscription) or you can't access the services you're not paying for ANYWAY. The only people affected are those paying for Office 365 but not using Office 365 version of the software that they are already paying for. That is literally IT.
Re: Commerical, and only affects current Office 36 (Score:2)
MS Office WebDAV support (Score:2)
This is not "pursading" (Score:2)
Sure, why not? (Score:2)
Ah yes, your periodic flavor of Microsoft schizophrenia...
Force people to pay subscription for Office, push ads in every nook and cranny of your OS, make more product lineups no one cares for, be the first to introduce hated intrusive privacy destroying telemetry features right on the core of Windows, use some of the dirtiest tactics on the book to fool costumers into upgrading their OS version to the latest... I've never seen such an impressive implosion showcase.
"Enjoying"? (Score:2)
[...] when customers connect to Office 365 services using a legacy version of Office, "they're not enjoying all that the service has to offer."
"Enjoy" is not a word I normally associate with using Microsoft software. "Endure" is better
Terms change after purchase (Score:2, Interesting)
And there you go. Microsoft changes the features and terms of your usage of the products you purchase, after you purchase them, whether you rent or buy.
This will probably fuck with Zotero (Score:3)
In principle this could prevent me from writing my scientific manuscripts with Word. On the other hand, nobody forces me to use the newest version of Word. Kind of to probe a point (but mostly because I like it more), I use Word 2007 to author all the manuscripts we publish. There really aren't any compelling reasons for me to upgrade to the new versions of Office.
Re: (Score:2)
I failed to ever see any reason to upgrade beyond Office 97. In fact TeX is the way to go.
Re: (Score:2)
I failed to ever see any reason to upgrade beyond Office 97. In fact TeX is the way to go.
TeX is not the way to go when the journal provides a Word document template.
"Daring people people to switch to Linux"? (Score:2)
I think the LibreOffice team should be looking at where MS Office is going with cloud storage and make sure their product offers something equivalent. If it does,
Way to go MS (Score:2)
Open Office (Score:2)
Fear. Uncertainty. Slashdot (Score:3)
I hope they follow through (Score:2)
I hope they do not change their mind, large business will have a cow over this. Why, updates controlled by a third party, rental fees and what about travel, do you need to be connected to the internet at 35,000' ?
Office 365 system requirements for client connectivity gives you time to review your long-term desktop strategy
I did, when Windows 95 came out, went to a fairly new OS and never looked back. Nothing like loosing work many times per week to give me incentive. Granted I heard M/S is much better these days, but as someone mentioned, the spyware on W10 keeps a tiny smile on my face.
Use LibreOffice - however (Score:2)
LibreOffice great but it is STILL missing a good Visio replacement. At work I use Visio HEAVILY. There is really no good open source replacement for Visio. I've tried all of them (I think).
I like Office365... (Score:2)
OK, ok, hang on. Only when I have to use it.
I work at a software company and we are a MS shop. I run Linux at home, and have since around '99. If I need to log into my work machine, I can launch my container that connects to the work vpn and does an RDP into my machine in about 10 seconds. Linux just works for me, even with MS (most of the time).
But I refuse to sync my phone with Outlook, for two reasons.
1. I don't want to check work email all the time, and have that expectation that I am always availab
"Enjoyment" ?? (Score:2)
FTFA :
Microsoft is claiming that when customers connect to Office 365 services using a legacy version of Office, "they're not enjoying all that the service has to offer.
"Enjoying" is a bloody funny word to use in the context of office software. If I wanted to spend the value of a subscription to Office 365 on "enjoyment" there are many things I'd choose first : fairground rides or ice-creams for example. A year's subs would even stretch to a hooker.
From the horses mouth... (Score:2)
Office 365 ProPlus or Office perpetual in mainstream support
Office 365 ProPlus or Office perpetual in mainstream support required to connect to Office 365 services. Starting October 13, 2020, Office 365 ProPlus or Office perpetual in mainstream support will be required to connect to Office 365 services. Office 365 ProPlus will deliver the best experience, but for customers who aren’t ready to move to the cloud by 2020, we will also support connections from Office perpetual in mainstream support.
The primary impact is to those purchasing MS "Business Essentials" licenses ($5/mo) and using "old" office versions. Effectively, they will be required to purchase office every 5 years (~$400) or upgrade to "Business Premium" ($12/mo).
Re: (Score:2)
maybe u are too dumb to understand how crypto works
Are you sure you are going to convince people if you call them dumb in advance for any objection?
Re: (Score:2)
maybe u are too dumb
Maybe one of us is.
Re: (Score:2)
Re: (Score:2, Insightful)
Use LibreOffice. It's better
No it's not. It's ok to avoid MS-Office if you don't want the lock-in and the constant scheming, but LibreOffice is not better. It's not even close.
Microsoft is terrible at a lot of things, but Office is excellent. Word, Excel, PowerPoint; they're all good products that are second to none. The online version though is awful, especially Outlook. For that Google has better products. Which is kind of funny since Microsoft is trying to push people to the cloud.