Microsoft trumpeted Office 365 customer successes at its U.S. Public Sector CIO Summit on Tuesday, but some of those otherwise happy clients have a wish list of features and enhancements they'd like to see in the vendor's cloud email and collaboration suite.
Microsoft announced eight Office 365 government and education customers, including the governments of Kansas City and Seattle, the San Diego County Regional Airport Authority and King County, Washington.
The company also said that more than 1 million workers are now using Office 365 in federal, state and local government agencies.
A couple of the customers announced on Tuesday touted a variety of benefits and efficiencies derived from the use of Office 365, including lower IT maintenance and equipment costs from turning off on-premise servers, as well as improved employee collaboration and communication.
However, they're also looking forward to continued Office 365 enhancements in areas like compliance with security regulations, usage analytics, software upgrade procedures, system administrator tools and service outage information.
The King County government has licensed Office 365 for about 10,000 employees, and is primarily using SharePoint Online for collaboration and Lync Online for IM, presence and videoconferencing.
The organization has more than 1,000 SharePoint sites for team collaboration, document sharing and project coordination, and Lync is being used widely to do live virtual meetings and record training videos, according to King County CIO Bill Kehoe.
King County plans to take its on-premise intranet to the cloud using SharePoint and will adopt the suite's Exchange Online component for email next year in order to turn off its on-premise Exchange 2010 system.
King County began using Microsoft hosted software with Office 365's predecessor, BPOS (Business Productivity Online Suite) in early 2011. It moved to Office 365 in February of last year.
"One efficiency has been that we don't have to build out an on-premise server environment for SharePoint and Lync," Kehoe said. "We rely on Microsoft's infrastructure, and they do the software upgrades and take care of the system maintenance."
"When we get our intranet fully into the cloud and move email to the cloud, over time those efficiencies will grow even more," he added.
Going forward, Kehoe wants Microsoft to make sure that Office 365 is as fully compliant as possible with U.S. government security regulations, such as the new Criminal Justice Information Service requirements.
"If we have to have a hybrid environment, where we have to build out on-premise servers for certain departments and agencies, that cuts down on our return-on-investment," he said. "The more we can put into the cloud, the more efficiencies and savings we're going to get."
