Office 365 Small Business and Enterprise

I have been working with Microsoft Office 365 Small Business version for 2 months now and I believe we have pretty much reached its limits.

As we are currently leaving migration until we are both back from our holiday we have been looking into more features of Microsoft office 365 that we might have previously missed, features such as RSS feeds, target audiences, info path lists, complex workflows and more. None of these appear to work in the small business edition, there appear to be a huge amount of restrictions that only allow us to do the simplest of task (no IT pro required). For us to continue with Microsoft Office 365 I believe we need to upgrade to the Enterprise edition, this will allow us to test features that may actually be useful to the University, it will also allow us to use features that even SharePoint 2003 currently use, such as target audience. To me, I believe that even Office 365 Small Business should be an improvement on SharePoint 2003 and not hold features back that would put 2003 ahead of small business.

So after we have looking into migration more closely and tested some of this, I believe we have no choice but to move up to Microsoft Office 365 Enterprise edition, so we can test these useful features.

RE

Small Business Version Update – Problems

Over the last few days Rob and I have come across some issues using the Small Business version of Office 365. The main problems arise when you wish to customise the  Team Site. You are however able to make certain modifications to the master page and the css files. But you do not seem to be able to edit the default headers and footers of the pages. The default Microsoft headers and footers are bright orange, and no matter how you customise the css file, the orange headers and footers just do not go. There are some .ascx files referenced in the master pages that could be related to the default header and footer, but there is no way to view these files or edit them that we know of at this time.

We have also been experiencing a ‘403 Forbidden’ errors. These have been occurring sporadically when clicking on links, and it’s not just happening on specific links. This issue has been ongoing over the last couple of days, and as of yet there has been no explanation of this issue. There has not even been any acknowledgement of this problem in the service health within the admin options.