[German]Microsoft intends to tighten the 'thumbscrews' at Office and force enterprises customers to subscribe to Office 365. On the other hand, a large number of companies using Office 365 complain about performance issues.
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Microsoft pushes traditional office users to Office 365
Microsoft offers its Office 365 as a subscription model with monthly payments. But there are still single user licenses that can be purchased as Office 2016. Such Office packages have the advantage that you only have to buy the license once and can then use Office for life.
Gartner analysts Michael Silver and Stephen Kleynhans now point out that the days of Office 2016 are more or less are limited. Microsoft is increasing the pressure on companies to switch to Office 365.
By the end of 2020, Microsoft will announce, according to Gartner, that only Office 365 ProPlus will have access to the Office 365 online services. Traditional Office packages, on the other hand, are not supported. Companies are therefore forced to switch to Office 365 as a rental model. Greg Keizers summarized this in this article on ComputerWorld.
Office 365: Users are claiming performance issues
The above information with the compulsion to switch to Office 365 may be noticed – who cares. But I came across an interesting German article by Michael Kroker earlier this month. Here is the essence of this article.
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- Zscaler, a California-based cloud security provider, has conducted a survey of Office 365 users through the polling institute TechValidate. It was about the challenges companies face when deploying Office 365, and the result is not so flattering for the Microsoft cloud solution.
- Many users experience negative network performance after the introduction of Office 365. This means that the productivity advantages hoped-for cannot be exploited.
About 69% of participants within the survey see the increased latency times as a problem with Office 365. This is because Office permanently keeps 12 to 20 network connections open per user. This network traffic runs in many companies via a central security gateway (which makes sense). As a result, latencies occur and companies struggle with bandwidth issues. This is so noticeable to users that the relevant office functions become slow. The result is available as a study in PDF format here.
What are your experiences in business environments? Is Office 2016 the preferred solution, or is there a shift towards Office 365? Can the bandwidth issues within the network be confirmed? Is the fact that Microsoft Office forces telemetry data a problem? And how is it seen that Microsoft Office will also update twice a year (similar to Windows 10)?
