Testing Office 365 and Blackberry Business Cloud Services from RIM

These days I've been testing Microsoft's Office 365 solution in convention with the Blackberry Business Cloud Services from RIM. I normally use Google Apps for my business but I wanted to test this new offer from Microsoft.

Being a Linux and Mac user, it is hard to stay away from Microsoft's office suite documents, and not OpenOffice nor iWork gave me full compatibility, and of course Google docs was not a good solution either.

Having my office suite applications in the cloud sounded like a great solution for me, it said those were not the full featured applications, but they were enough for me, and they were fully compatible with Firefox and Safari, as well as Google Chrome but not with Chromium (maybe just something I needed to change and make chromium report itself as Google Chrome).

The integration of the solution with the iPhone was great, for email, tasks, calendar and address book, using active sync. I've also tested it with Android and Enhanced email application and worked great too, I was using a Samsung Ace phone.

The integration with the free Blackberry cloud services and Exchange online from Microsoft was also great, I was able to setup my Blackberry bold 9780 with no problems and sync my account to use email, tasks and calendar.

The only problem I've found was the inability to print from the online applications, I was expecting to be able to export to PDF and then use Okular or any other application to print the final documents, but that was not possible, to me this is a serious drawback in the offer from Microsoft. That is going to force any user to also buy the standard Office suite.

I really hope they may change this in the future, until that I'll not use the solution. In my opinion if Microsoft is going to offer a cloud solution there should be no need to install anything in your computer other than the browser, otherwise is not a solution and just a complement of the desktop solution.