Digital White Papers

21 WWW.ILTANET.ORG | ILTA WHITE PAPER OFFICE 365 Geing Ready: The Lowdown on Office 365 Compatibility will be some roadblocks, restrictions, work-arounds, limitations and compromises ahead—not necessarily caused by Office 365 itself, but by the soware you will want to use with it. And, if you're curious whether your current supporting software will be compatible with Office 365, the answer is, unfortunately, "It depends!" The Variables Whether a given soware program is compatible with Office 365 will depend on several things which can be categorized under two headings: the specific version of an application being used and the way it gets onto the machine that's using it, which I'll get to later. For now, what do I mean by the specific version of an application? Well, clearly there is now a wider range of devices that attorneys may want to use for work than ever before. They will probably already have a desktop machine. Increasingly, they will use laptops and will want to use tablets and smartphones. Office 365 enables that. It is important to remember that when I use any of the Office 365 suite of applications—for example, Word—on a desktop, then on a tablet, then on a mobile phone, Word may look and behave in much the same way, however, the device is dictating which specific version of Word I use each time. On the desktop I'm using Word for Windows, on the tablet I'm using Word for an iOS or Android tablet, on my smartphone I'm using Word for an iOS or Android smartphone and so on. And actually each different version offers different functionality. And it's not even subtly different functionality. There are some things that I simply won't be able to do, depending on the version I'm using. (Although broadly speaking, I can do more things, with more choices, in a Windows environment than anywhere else.) And it's not even just whether things can or can't be done. There are also things that are just different. By using Word on an iPad, I can save documents directly to NetDocuments in the cloud. That's not an option open to me using Word for Windows on any device at the moment, so NetDocuments have worked to ensure this restriction does not impact their users. The Delivery Model A further variable is how the software gets on to the device I'm using. Office 365 lets you access software in one of three ways. It can be loaded onto the machine in the conventional way, where it will sit and be used (Windows desktops, tablets and smartphones). It can be downloaded and installed onto the machine by streaming from a server somewhere (this is called "click to run") and finally, the software can be streamed from the cloud as it is being used, and never downloaded onto the machine or device at any point (Office Online). In this scenario, I could walk into your office, sit down at any PC with internet access and use Office applications on that machine. But when I log off, you can't then use those applications on that machine, because they're not there. While this model provides terrific flexibility, it offers the most limited functionality of all the delivery models. It's up to the firm, of course, to decide which models to adopt and support. No maer what decision is made, your supporting soware will be confronted by—and have to interact with—a different incarnation A surprising number of people don't understand what Office 365 truly is. They don't understand there will probably be some roadblocks, restrictions, work-arounds, limitations and compromises ahead—not necessarily caused by Office 365 itself, but by the software you will want to use with it.

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