Chris A Watkins - Business

Differences in File Storage Office 365 with SharePoint on-line should never be compared to Dropbox, Google Apps, Google Docs, Amazon cloud offerings or Microsoft OneDrive Live. These are good products and competitive in the market place they serve, but they are just cloud storage. They all store files off-site in an NTFS type file store. SharePoint on-line stores files in a SQL database delivering huge advantages in security, file grouping, file analysis and file location. What does this mean in practice ? – If you consider a standard NTFS file storage system such as you would find on any computer .     When you create and save a file you are prompted to give the file a name so that you can find it again when it is needed. Most modern software will also be configured to save the file to a default location such as ‘documents’ or ‘my documents’. You can elect to modify the location by creating new sub-folders within the ‘documents’ folder. This

Differences in Software as a Service ( SaaS ) This is the 21st century, the New Computer Age. Cloud services and SaaS are available for all to use. Word on-line, Excel on-line and Power Point on-line are just such services. They are available to all who want them, they are free, if taken via One Drive Live, and they enable the creation, editing and viewing of Word documents, Excel spreadsheets and PP presentations on ANY device that has a browser installed. This without any need to install software on the device used. The on-line software that is used to create the files is the same on-line software used to view them. There can be no incompatibilities and no missing fonts. Open Document Standards, to which these most office applications conform, requires that any document file should contain the properties of style, layout, font etc. These elements are the property of the document file and will travel with it wherever it is stored or sent. However, issues can still aris