Are En Pointe and Consistent Computer Bargains Inc. shilling reviews on Microsoft’s Website?

I’ve been checking out Office 365 as I mentioned in this post.  Part of that is finding the right Microsoft Partner to help me out.  When I click on “Top Cloud Partners” I get a list of MS partners.  In that list it tells you how many reviews they have and the star rating.  En Pointe has 207 reviews.  CCB has 153.  If you look that’s far more than anyone except two other companies which also have suspect reviews.

What do En Pointe and CCB have in common and why do I think someone is shilling?  They have lots of reviews in the last couple months.  They have multiple reviews every few days.  The reviews are completely positive with nothing negative to say.  They are almost all 5 stars.  And in En Pointe’s case, the usernames mostly follow the same pattern of names and numbers (name1234).

I’m not saying they are shilling, but shilling is a common game on the internet.  En pointe’s reviews sure do quack like a duck and walk like a duck.

Microsoft should pay attention to their review system to make sure that companies aren’t fraudulently boosting themselves.

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Office 365: First Impressions

I’ve been hearing about Office 365, so I signed up and am giving it a whirl.  There’s much to talk about, but here’s some notable first impressions:

• BES is not supported.  I don’t know if there’s a way to integrate BES servers into your environment, but MS doesn’t support BES.  You can connect a Blackberry using IMAP.  If you do that, you have to sync contacts and calendars manually.  ActiveSync is fully supported.
• If you have Office 2010 Professional Plus installed and integrated with Office 365, you cannot use web apps.  You have to use the installed apps and then save into Sharepoint.
• Office Web Apps are significantly stripped down versions of the Office Apps.  They will probably be fine for most Office users, but this should be understood before making choices.
• Office Web Apps can be used in IE, Firefox,  and Safari.  I haven’t tested Chrome, but I’m sure that works too.
• It appears that Live Meeting has been rolled into Lync.  That’s great!
• Lync can be accessed using OWA, but it’s a stripped down version.
• Sharepoint Workspace is probably the best way to connect into Sharepoint file stores, but it is possible to map drives into the file stores.  I doubt this is advisable.
• It’s possible to pick individual Office 365 services instead of the designated “plans.”  This ala carte ordering system allows you to spend as little as $2 a month for Lync only or as much as you’d like.  The nice thing about this is that if you are already licensed for Office 2010 Professional Plus, you can pick plan E2 and add-on services thus saving $12 per user per month (for Office).
• Exchange Online Archiving is $4 per user per month.  I think that’s a good price.
• Office 365 is a very powerful service.  It enables organizations to quickly put up Exchange and Sharepoint environments in very little time.  Office 365 can be about as simple or as complex as the user needs.

That’s pretty much it for now off the top of my head.  I recommend organizations of all sizes become knowledgable in the capabilities of Office 365.  It gives companies the ability to replace significant amounts of infrastructure with a very capable service.  And for small companies it puts them on a level playing field with the big boys.  I hate to say it, but once it’s rolled out, it requires very little back-end IT attention.

www.office365.com

Office 365 Buyers Guide (in .xps format for some bizarre reason)