Many Office Live Small Business users fret over Office 365 transition

26.03.2012

Rebecca Wettemann, a Nucleus Research analyst, said that so far her company's analysis of the use of Office 365 by small businesses shows that the benefits of Office 365 "far outweigh the costs."

"Cutting down on the number of competing services helps Microsoft keep support costs lower. OLSB may have been cheaper but SMBs looking at the upside of 365 are likely to find one of the packages compelling -- and smart ones will sharpen their negotiating skills to get Office 365 and the transition at a price point that makes sense," she said via email.

Still, critical OLSB users say that Microsoft could have come up with automated tools and processes to aid in the transition, and that the cost of hiring a partner will further add to the higher cost of Office 365, as compared with OLSB.

OLSB users are particularly peeved at the process of migrating their OLSB-hosted and designed websites over to Office 365. Microsoft indicates that OLSB users copy and paste their web pages over to Office 365, but many users are in the transition, especially if the websites have .

According to the Microsoft spokeswoman, there is one partner called that recently developed a tool for automatically transitioning OLSB websites to Office 365. CloudVisors is offering a 50 percent discount to OLSB users -- a special fee of $199.95.