The Hidden Costs of Microsoft's Free Office Online

Michael_Curator writes "Despite what you've heard, the online version of Office 2010 announced by Microsoft earlier this week won't be free to corporate users. Business customers will either have to pay a subscription fee or purchase corporate access licenses (CALs) for Office in order to be given access to the online application suite (Microsoft already does this with email — the infamous Outlook Web Access). But wait — there's more! A Microsoft spokesperson told me that customers will need to buy a SharePoint server, which ranges from $4,400 plus CALs, or $41,000 with all CALs included, if they want to share documents created using the online version of Office 2010."

A Bad Idea

[Techmeology]

Cloud computing is a bad idea. It gives software companies an unprecedented level of control over our data. If they decided to up the price of their service, or withdraw it entirely, there is little we can do. Microsoft is famous for manipulative behavior. I would not endow them with this level of trust; nor would any other sane person. If you are looking for an alternative, might I suggest http://www.openoffice.org/ [openoffice.org] (many people I know also use it for its superior equation editor, in addition to the fact that it is free and open source).

Re:Microsoft copying Apple?

[fuzzyfuzzyfungus]

No MS hardware involved. "A sharepoint server" is just your basic x86 server from anybody running a particular set of MS software.

Re:Move along...

[sam0737]

SharePoint (not 2010, i mean the current version) actually works well with Firefox. I have yet to noticed any different when browsing it with Firefox/IE7.

Re:Move along...

[illumin8]

SharePoint (not 2010, i mean the current version) actually works well with Firefox. I have yet to noticed any different when browsing it with Firefox/IE7.

Actually, Sharepoint works terrible with Firefox. All of the advanced directory and file browsing features are disabled, since Firefox doesn't support the "Internet Explorer is your file browser" functionality that IE does. Sharepoint is basically just a glorified WebDAV server, but trust Microsoft to use proprietary IE only protocols instead of standard WebDAV, which would have worked with any standards compliant browser.

Google charges too, for corporate Docs accounts

[themeparkphoto]

Google has paid services too with similar pricing models. While there is a free "Google for domains" that gives you docs, etc, on your domain, there are additional paid tiers of support.

Re:Move along...

[YrWrstNtmr]

SP works with Firefox at a basic level. Any of the higher level functionality (editing in place, slide libraries, checkout/in, etc.) needs IE, ActiveX, and Office.

The real name for SharePoint is Microsoft Office SharePoint Server. It's an online extension of the Office suite.

Re:well duh

[larry bagina]

Additionally you have government regulations (enforced with jailtime and fines) for HIPAA, Sarbanes-Oxley, and other shit.

Re:Move along...

[tonycheese]

I'm confused; when did Microsoft claim the suite was going to be free to corporate users? From the PC Pro article,

Microsoft says the online applications will be free to consumers and small businesses, via Windows Live. Larger businesses can choose to host their own versions of the web applications via their SharePoint server or buy them as a hosted service from Microsoft.

I found this article from the previous Slashdot summary about Office 2010.

Re:Software licensing is cheap

[Shados]

SharePoint works fine. And you don't exactly need to pay a bundle for it if you just want document sharing and collabortion (since Sharepoint Services is a component of Windows Server. Only the souped up "enhanced" version costs, and has a million pieces to support).

I run Sharepoint on a one server virtual machine, and probably have an higher than average load on it, and its fine, and I definately don't need to maintain it much at all. And at work we're running one of the largest non-Microsoft sharepoint farm in the world, in a unix based environment (no active directory, lots of *nix clients, box linux box than windows box, etc) and while it sure has the hiccups than any webfarm of the size ends up having, it does work pretty good.

In any case, as of the latest version, Alfresco is a very respectable open source alternative that will run on Linux boxes and uses mainstream open source components, and is seen as "Sharepoint" from Office 2003/2007's point of view, and it integrates quite seemlessly with it. Give it a shot, its pretty damn good.

Re:well duh

[jonbryce]

Other than the access control functions, Sharepoint doesn't do any of these things either.

Re:well duh

[JoshuaDFranklin]

You don't understand what Sharepoint is, do you? We rolled out MOSS Sharepoint and used it for a few months. Even Windows users preferred email because the interface made it so painful to find things. Sharepoint does not have any of the functionality you list, either. There is an add-on that includes access control, but guess what? Client machines much be logged into the same domain (or have a a trust set up). In other words, Sharepoint has no access control functionality that can be used any differently than a Windows Server fileshare! It also stores documents in a database, and as you get a lot of documents (say, 1000) performance degrades. Maybe Mediawiki is a bad comparison since it has a completely different feature set, but any business would be better served with an actual document management system like Alfresco. (People also seem obsessed with Sharepoint's "blogs" which have much less functionality than Wordpress.)

Re:A Bad Idea

[mR.bRiGhTsId3]

But at least Google/Microsoft have solutions in place for collaboration and other fun things. Some are even self-hosted if you want to fork over cash. What has OO.o got going for it? A free price tag is about it.

Re:well duh

[jbeale53]

FYI, Sharepoint 2007 SP2 now supports Firefox with no config changes.