Home > Welcome to the SharePoint Workshop (Live on 365!)
Big news: This site is now up on Office 365. After years of hosted, then on on-premise, I finally made the descision to go all Office 365. I'm a big believer of learning by doing, so living within the restrictions of a shared hosting environment like 365 will be interesting. One thing I can say right off: it's a bargain.
So last night (11/18/2011) we had an outage from 7:23 to 9:21 PM. No word on what happened, just SharePoint down. We'll see if the service team has transparency. There is a nice interface for service availablity though...
In the process of developing components for Office 365 I have learned that it is not exactly SharePoint. By that I mean that the Microsoft team will hobble or remove features that come out of the box in a standard offering but they don't feel compelled to describe exactly what they have done. Fortunately there is a pretty active community within the service where folks report issues and Microsoft response. A couple instances:
- Office 365 does not support email enabled libraries. This makes sense when you think about how SharePoint implements incoming email -- that approach doesn't scale to multi-tenant environments. There are a couple possible work-arounds for creative minds...
- Overlayed Calendars don't work. This is an acknowledged bug.
- Some things are prohibited in Sandboxed solutions that are allowed in other environments (here is where a list would be handy). Access to the current assembly resources is prohibited for example.
Update 2/212/2012: Anonymous access is severly limited in O365. There is no way to gather user feedback from a site -- something you could easily do with a cheap SharePoint Foundation site. You can get cheap licenses for external partners ($100 per 50 users), but anonymous is limited read-only on the public facing side. Sooo...
Major Limitations
- No email enabled libraries, at least in the E3 license
- Difficult AD integration (requires ADFS setup rather than just linking ADs)
- No way to do a public facing Web 2.0 site
- No way to connect web parts
- No way to call web services from sandboxed code (this is a SharePoint limitation)
Why Should You Choose Office 365?
O365 is great for small organizations that don't have IT departments. It is self-service and it works well. You get a lot for your money, but you don't get everything!
What I like is that O365 limits small clients so they can't do what they should avoid anyway. Microsoft would increase the value of the product by figuring out how to enable incoming email and anonymous input without bringing down the system.
In the meantime, you can work around these limitations by setting up an inexpensive hosted Foundation site on Apps4Rent, FPWeb.net, or one of the other services out there. It will add about $25/month to your total costs and complicate your SharePoint administration, but you'll get everything you need.