Finally, I received my Office365 beta testing offer from Microsoft. I’m writing this as a journal as I set it up on my desktop.
- For this beta test I decided to use a Windows 7, 64 bit desktop with 8G RAM and IE9 to make sure everything goes smoothly. Usually I use FireFox, but it may have some limitations with Office365 and I didn’t want to take the risk.
- The first surprise was the beta is not available for Australians. (It is available in the USA, and most European counties, but not for Australians)
- I picked that I’m in US and received a waring that I cannot change this in the future! What if my company operates in multiple countries? Strange, but it could be just for beta testers.
- It needs to create a new MS ID, which cannot be the same as my MS passport. I would have preferred it to be the same, but maybe it is a good thing. Keep private and business separate. Although in my case my MS ID is used for business already.
- It looks like it creates a subdomain for the organisation mydomain.onmicrosoft.com and gave me an email address of myname@mydomain.onmicrosoft.com. (Update: Later on you can add your own domain, this is just for the initial setup)
- It told me to install the apps as the next step. It asked me to install Lync first (Didn’t give me an option if I want to use Lync not) and asked me to install 32 or 64 bit on my 64bit Windows 7 box.
- The file is 71M and IE9 is estimating 50 minutes to download. Very slow. They probably didn’t allocate too much resources for the beta testers. (My Internet link can easily go up to about 400KB/sec, so it is not my link causing such a slow download. And this is just the Lync component, what about MS Office? That is much bigger than 71M.
- Well after 40 minutes I checked the download and nothing is there. It didn’t download and didn’t run. I clicked on “Install” again and it is started to download again from 0%. It didn’t pick up where it stopped before. I saw the previous download getting up to at least 50%, but it started again. MS didn’t offer to use any download manager which allows a re-start of the download.
- After just over 2 hours I managed to download and install Lync 201 and when it started it wanted to log in. It has picked up my other MS Live ID. I changed it to the newly created Offiec365 ID and it came up wit the message I need to install another software before I can log in. Luckily this is just a small piece of SW called msoidcli.msi. It downloaded quickly. This is the Microsoft Online Services Sign-in assistant.
- After installation it asked me for Sign-in address, username and password. I had some difficulty to log in because mydomain.onmicrosoft.com didn’t work as the sign in address. I couldn’t work out what I should put in each fieldso I gave up for a minute and I’ll come back to this.
- I went on continuing the setup to install the MS Office components. This time it also asked me to log in, but it asked me for my User ID and password. myname@mydomain.onmicrosoft.com and the password I created previously worked.
- I told me it will re-configure Outlook, MS Office and also downloading a single sign on product.
- Then it asked me to restart my PC.
- After re-start it finished, the install and told me MS Outlook needs manual configuration.
- I haven’t used Outlook on this desktop before and it had Office 2007 SP1 installed already. I started it up and asked for the auto configuration details. Entered email address in myname@mydomain.onmicrosoft.com format, password and it auto configured Outlook without any pain.
- I went back and tried log in again to Lync 2010 for Office 365. I googled the issue and it seems I’m not the only one got confused. It turned out the Sign in address and login name are both the same. myname@mydomain.onmicrosoft.com and the password I specifies earlier. OK, this worked finally.
- I fired up MS Word and created a small document. When I went to Save to Office Live it tells me to “Sign in to Office Live Workspace beta”. Clicked on Sign in and nothing happened. Tried a couple of times, re-started my PC, but still, I was unable to save documents to the cloud.
- I logged in to the Office365 Management portal and created a word document from there. The On-line version looks very much like the real MS Word, but most options are missing. For example, I can add tables, but I cannot edit background colors or make any fancy change on the table properties, like shadow effect.
- Then I tried to save the document created on-line and edit it using my local MS Word. It worked, but I still wasn’t able to save the modifications back to the cloud.
- I started up MS Excel to see if I get better luck with it than MS Word. I couldn’t find the option “Save to Office Live”, just the standard save options.
Conclusion:
I have spent just over 5 hours on testing out Office365 and although it shows some potential I think it has a long way to go before it can be used as a serious business productivity tool Well, it is only beta and MS may fix up some of the issues I have experienced. The other issue for me was the speed. I have a decent Internet connection yet using Office365 beta was annoyingly slow for me.
I look forward testing it again in a few month time once it is released in Australia.
Steven
