2014-03-20

Microsoft Office 365: Outlook (OWA) to Office Docs (One Drive Pro) FAIL!!!

Thought I'd give Office 365 a test spin.  Certainly the low cost per month for OWA and Office functionality has it's appeal.  Took me less than 2 minutes to figure out MS still doesn't have a clue what a modern mesh of integrated web application should look and function like.

Take the simplest of Use Cases:  Someone just emailed me a Word Document.  Great, I'd like to save this to my One Drive and continue to edit it from there using MS Word.  Being familiar to Google Gmail/Drive/GoogleDoc platform, I just expected this to be a simple series of clicks, I thought that was the whole point of webifying everything.  WRONG.  Instead you must, download the document to your local computer and then upload it to SkyDrive, (I mean OneDrive ;-)

MS Support Thread Regarding this Use Case: http://community.office365.com/en-us/forums/154/t/187507.aspx

Now this isn't the end of the world, is actually a relatively trivial task, but it sucks and I can see a number of problems with it.  What if I'm not using my personal PC and I don't want to save document to the local disk.  At a web cafe or someone elses PC, I won't be sure that I can securely erase what I save locally.  Having worked an IT Helpdesk, I can tell you for a fact that many users have trouble locating where on local disk they save things via browser download.  This download / upload process requires them to remember a location twice.

Upon noticing this flaw I submitted an Office 365 feedback.  This was my reply to MS:

With an Office 365 subscription, Documents can't be save directly from OWA to OneDrive Pro.  Are you kidding me!?!?

I think your requirements should have looked something like this:

1.) A functional Webmail client
2.) A functional Web Office Suite
3.) 1 & 2 work together nicely, in something that resembles a half competent Web 2.0 web app.

Back to Gmail for me, thanks for coming out to try-outs Microsoft.

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