Value of Office 365 Business Essentials
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The title of this thread may change depending on the direction it goes. Also, it's entirely possible that this will likely need to be broken into multiple threads.
Here's the discussion thread from this exchange with @scottalanmiller
https://mangolassi.it/topic/1022/what-are-you-doing-right-now/74069
@scottalanmiller said in What Are You Doing Right Now:
@EddieJennings said in What Are You Doing Right Now:
Office 365 Business Essentials suite -- tough to beat that price point.
Is it? What features are you getting at what price? For a small business (tiny), where is the value?
For my personal E-mail address, I use Zoho's Mail Lite plan, which is $12 / year, and is sufficient for my E-mail needs.
For my single-member LLC, I have an Office 365 Business Essentials subscription ($60 / year). The features of the subscription I use the most are E-mail, One Drive for Business storage, One Note (for use with iPad in during private lessons), and occasionally the online versions of Word and Excel.
My major pain point with Office 365 Business Essentials revolves around One Drive for Business. It would be glorious if there was a Linux client for it; though, I have read about using rclone to mount the storage. At one time I was going to run a NextCloud instance in colocation as an alternative, but alas, the cost of colocation killed that project.
One Note
Way back when I used 2-part carbonless lesson sheets, where I kept the yellow copy, and gave the student the white copy. What I do now is draw / write in a One Note document on my iPad, download a PDF of the document on my laptop, upload that PDF to a page on Squarespace that a student accesses to view that PDF, other uploaded documents, and hear an audio recording of their lesson.
Note: The audio recording is done on my phone, uploaded to One Drive for Business, downloaded to laptop, converted to .mp3, and uploaded to SquareSpace.
Solution for Offering Private Lessons Remotely
I've done Skype lessons in the past as make-up lessons for students, but I'm considering trying this concept as the primary mode of teaching for some students who are interested in taking lessons, but the drive is too far. Seeing how we use Teams at work for some conferencing with folks outside of the organization, I'm looking to see if I can leverage what I can with Teams from my Office 365 Subscription.
Conclusion
I'd like to move away from using Office 365 simply to not have to rely on Microsoft for services; however, One Note, and having the storage available (even if it can be a pain to access at times) is worthy of $60 / year. -
How much storage do you need?
Zoho Workplace starts at $36/year. But you get almost no storage.
For Private Lessons, why use anything like Teams?
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@scottalanmiller said in Value of Office 365 Business Essentials:
How much storage do you need?
Right now 50 GB. However, I need to find some time to think through what my needs actually are and how I want to store data. Soon, I'll get back to making some YouTube content again and the files associated with that (before any kind of compression) will be storage hungry.
For Private Lessons, why use anything like Teams?
The two things that I want for remote private lessons (in order of need) are
- Video chat capability
- Ability to record a chat
Since Teams is replacing Skype for Business, I figured I'd give it a look. It's unlikely that Teams will be the solution for anything. Zoom caught my eye, as that was used for the continuing education class I took for the past several weeks.
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Zoom is a great product when it is only you and one other participant.
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@JaredBusch said in Value of Office 365 Business Essentials:
Zoom is a great product when it is only you and one other participant.
We had a class of 6 (including the instructor) and it worked fine. My use case will only have two participants (student and I).
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@EddieJennings said in Value of Office 365 Business Essentials:
@JaredBusch said in Value of Office 365 Business Essentials:
Zoom is a great product when it is only you and one other participant.
We had a class of 6 (including the instructor) and it worked fine. My use case will only have two participants (student and I).
Yes, it works fine at any size. But single user and single viewer like you want matches the their free plan usage.
Oh and it works great on Fedora
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@JaredBusch said in Value of Office 365 Business Essentials:
Oh and it works great on Fedora
Yep! Between Fedora and my MacOS, it ran the best with Fedora
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@JaredBusch
Zoom is actually great. I just hate when companies don't handle security the right way:
https://medium.com/bugbountywriteup/zoom-zero-day-4-million-webcams-maybe-an-rce-just-get-them-to-visit-your-website-ac75c83f4ef5 -
@dave_c Sorry can't read. They disabled my desire to view the site.
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@JaredBusch
I understand, I just close the annoying dialog and go on.
