It’s been two days since the public release of Office 365 beta and Microsoft forums are lively to say the least. On the Office 365 community forum there are heaps of technical questions and complaints around some very specific problems that beta testers are encountering, as well as a smattering of compliments about the service.
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The majority of complaints—the threads with 10 or more posts; focus on issues with Sharepoint Online, Lync interoperability with Mac, and Exchange mobile syncing.
Microsoft beta testers seem to be having a hard time, especially with SharePoint Online. Several posters reported that their initial setup of Office 365 hangs during the SharePoint portion of setup:
“We are doing the standard setup of Office 365 and the SharePoint is hanging.”
“I am having the same issue, seeing ‘..this may take a few minutes’ on the sharepoint online site creation, now waiting for appox. 48 hours.”
“Two days later the sharepoint site has successfully been created. It just seems to take much more than a ‘few minutes’, but otherwise is fine now.”
Another big SharePoint issue, one that is generating multiple threat posts, is a problem with SharePoint sites:
“[The]SharePoint site doesn’t seem to exist. When I login, it either goes into a loop between windows live login and sharepoint.com…”
“None of the user accounts I created can access the sharepoint public or team sites.”
Some of the SharePoint access issues are actually problems with DNS records and not specifically with Office 365.
The majority of beta testers are technology professionals. Many of them have existing Exchange on-premise servers or are currently Business Productivity Online Suite (BPOS) customers. BPOS users have no choice but to adopt Office 365 since Microsoft is requiring them to transition within 12 months. One poster complained about a problem he encountered after migrating from BPOS, and that he can no longer send email from an external source to Office 365 after adding his company’s domain to the service.
There is an interesting post from a user experiencing problems setting up an Android phone with Exchange online. The user writes that he followed Microsoft’s instructions for configuring the device to sync with mail, calendar, and contacts. After doing so, he got only the cryptic error, “Failed to create the account, Please try again later.” The user noted that the same phone was previously able to sync with an on-premise Exchange 2007 server. A moderator on the forum, presumably from Microsoft, suggested the device be set to accept all SSL certificates and also suggested testing the validity of the connection to the online Exchange server. No response yet from the user if the suggestions worked.
Complaints are also being made about lack of support and the time it is taking to get an email invitation to test the service:
“This is IMO unacceptably slow service: ‘You will receive an email invitation from us as soon as your account is ready. We anticipate that the average wait for an account is approximately 2-4 weeks during the Beta period.'”
“I filed a support ticket…and got the answer to instead post my problem here in the forum.”
Questions abound about interoperability with Mac, particularly with Microsoft’s Lync client. A forum mod responded that while Lync 2010 is not supported on Mac, the Lync Web App—which can respond to Lync invites but not initiate them—can run on Safari and Firefox on Max OS 10.4.8+.
The comments are not all gloomy. One poster called Office 365 a “pretty great service” and another stated that “I’m pumped about being here and being part of the Beta, I also enjoy some of the challenges as I feel they keep your sharp.”
It’s important to note that Office 365 is still in beta and hopefully, Microsoft will have these issues worked out before final release. In the meantime, we have a request for comment out to Microsoft and will update this piece when they respond.