Office 365 versus Remote Desktop Hosting

Blog Post by Michael Carter Cardium Outsourcing Ltd – YourOfficeAnyWhere.

I have just been emailed by a colleague from Microsoft who says they have a customer with a few distributed users (work from home/on the road) and they have opened up an office in Southern Ireland. He asked “What is the YourOfficeAnyWhere USP against Office 365?”

My answer follows:-

• Applications, Applications, Applications! The applications a customer may want access to from multiple locations are not provided or resolved with the Office 365 solution. Office 365 is a one size fits all solution but as we all know businesses are all different shapes and sizes and one size doesn’t fit all. Customers don’t just run office applications such as word and excel, and if they do there is potentially another issue……..
• Internet connectivity. Customers with more than 10-15 users in one location and a relatively small internet connection (2-4mb) will see performance issues opening large documents (and saving them) or sending a large email to “all internal staff” of the company

 Applications

If the customer has applications that users need to access remotely away from the office, for example accounts software, line of business applications with a database back end, CRM applications which are not available over the web and need to work on a company network (for example Sage ACT!) our (Microsoft) solution “web enables”  applications that are usually tied to the company’s internal network and can’t be accessed easily once you are not in the same office as the server and data. I.e. the application needs a fast network to run satisfactorily and Internet access doesn’t provide this at the moment. Office 365 does not address the millions of different applications businesses rely on on a day to day basis.

 Access or SQL database applications  are a good example where SME businesses have developed these over time, become completely reliant on them for business processes, expanded to multiple locations but VPN connections are no good from remote locations as these applications expect RPC at 100mb un-contended and not 2mb (ADSL) shared. These businesses want to be able to access the information from anywhere but don’t want to spend £50K to develop on a web platform? We have many customers where we have published applications for them as a remote application which they click on and it launches as if it is a local application even though it is running in the data centre.  The solution above requires just 64K of bandwidth per user to run as the only data being transferred over the Internet is the screen changes.

 Bandwidth

If there are lots of users in one location then Office 365 is going to hammer band width so they either need a very good ADSL line with decent up and down speeds which is potentially costly or high speed internet might not even be available

A 2 MB email with an attachment to 20 internal company  users is 2mb out 40mb back in using Office 365. On our solution the email is routed internally to Outlook running on the remote desktop so this doesn’t affect the customers ADSL connection or bandwidth. To send this it requires just the 64K ADSL connection (mentioned above) and the email is sent internally on our gigabit network. 

ADSL upload speeds are typically 250K to 500K so saving a large document to an Office 365 system (SharePoint)  is going to be slow. This is even more problematic with multiple users in one location. Using our hosted desktop solution this is no longer a problem because saving a document in word or excel is saving to the server at gigabit speed rather than 250K

The YourOfficeAnyWhere solution is like having your own server on your own internal network in terms of the Internet bandwidth used, without having to purchase it, back it up, patch it and replace it in 3 years time!

Oh and finally Microsoft don’t have any data centres in the UK if this is a problem (you want to know where your data is) then it isn’t a problem on the YourOfficeAnyWhere platform as our data centre is in Manchester.