A Quick Look At Microsoft Office 365 Beta

The following article was removed from the blog during the Blogger outage. I'm reposting it for the benefit of those who missed it previously.

I had the opportunity to sign up for the Microsoft Office 365 beta program over the weekend. This is "Office-in-the-cloud" with SharePoint thrown in for good measure. I was curious to see if Office 365 had anything to offer from a business intelligence standpoint, so I put it to the test. Warning: you may find this a little geekier than the business-professional-oriented content I normally post on this site.

What I'm testing

The trial service I subscribed to was "Plan P1," which is targeted to small businesses or work teams up to 25 users. It includes Web versions of Office 2010 apps Outlook, Word, Excel, PowerPoint, and OneNote, plus a SharePoint instance with a basic team site already set up. You also get trial versions of Lync (the successor to Live Meeting for collaboration) and access to SharePoint Designer as downloads to your desktop. There's an option, that I've not yet explored, to subscribe to Office Professional Beta on a trial basis. That augments the basic plan with Access and other goodies.

First impressions

Office 365 is geared toward remote communication and collaboration, not business intelligence. After poking around I found that the SharePoint instance available in this offering does not support most of the BI functionality included in a traditional SharePoint on-premises installation, including PerformancePoint. I confirmed this via documentation available on the Microsoft web site. On the bright side, the online SharePoint instance does support SQL Server and OLE DB data providers. This means that you should be able to connect to SQL Server or other databases on your premises and make them available to users of the Excel web client for incorporation in pivot tables and charts. It does what it does reasonably well. If you wanted to you could run Office completely in the cloud (although Microsoft would obviously prefer that you not so that). To that end, as part of the the setup