Microsoft Office 2021 launches on 5th October

[Saracen999]

....

Sure for home/basic office use there are free alternatives that are absolutely fine but don't discount the advantages for large enterprise of the extra's office brings in.

Even I wouldn't dispute different criteria apply for home (and maybe SOHO) to medium companies, and different yet again for large enterprises. Thelatter especially isn't and never has been my market sector and these days, not even medium companies are.

.... The automatic backup of docs to encrypted onedrive is also useful given recent ransomware.

....

Indeed, but you don't need 365 to do automated doc backups, whether to local drives, local/remote servers, or cloud (including but not limited to onedrive). My backup suite does all that, including automation, and including sync'ing, tiered backup stragegies to multiple locations, and to owned or cloud resources. I just choose not to use cloud resources, but I could. Oh, snapshots too.

[cheesemp]

Indeed, but you don't need 365 to do automated doc backups, whether to local drives, local/remote servers, or cloud (including but not limited to onedrive). My backup suite does all that, including automation, and including sync'ing, tiered backup stragegies to multiple locations, and to owned or cloud resources. I just choose not to use cloud resources, but I could. Oh, snapshots too.

I'm sure it does. It just that this is all bundled and handled auto magically for your basic users who wouldn't know a documents folder on C drive from a cloud backup solution

I've said it before on here. Microsoft are following Apple/Google down the do everything for the user automatically so they can't $#@! up. Its sometimes annoying for us techy types but I'll be honest it makes life easier for the majority of users (and reduces the effort I put into helping friends/family!)

[Saracen999]

I'm sure it does. It just that this is all bundled and handled auto magically for your basic users who wouldn't know a documents folder on C drive from a cloud backup solution

I've said it before on here. Microsoft are following Apple/Google down the do everything for the user automatically so they can't $#@! up. Its sometimes annoying for us techy types but I'll be honest it makes life easier for the majority of users (and reduces the effort I put into helping friends/family!)

Indeed, but the postI quoted from was talking about enterprise features. Plenty of enterprise users are utterly non-techie, but then I would expect an enterprise IT dept to take care of sync'ing and auto-backing up doc folders, and probably not relying on a tool built in to 365 to do it. It certainly is horses for courses, though.

[cheesemp]

Indeed, but the postI quoted from was talking about enterprise features. Plenty of enterprise users are utterly non-techie, but then I would expect an enterprise IT dept to take care of sync'ing and auto-backing up doc folders, and probably not relying on a tool built in to 365 to do it. It certainly is horses for courses, though.

That's what I'm trying to say - my large multinational software dev firm used to use automated symantec tools to encrypt our laptops/desktops and transfer images to backup while using a network drive to store docs. They've now migrated to use onedrive/bitlocker because its less effort to manage it. Lets face it less work and less risk of things being incorrectly configured is always going to win in the corporate world...

[mondayriot]

Meanwhile, my local council still uses Office 2007... How can you improve something that just works?

I dread to think of the software vulnerabilities they are exposed to with a software lifecycle policy like that. I guess the council doesnt deal with names, addresses, phone numbers etc. Oh wait...