Compare Office 365 with iCloud
Apple recently announced iCloud, the new cloud platform from Apple. In this article, I will compare the features available in Office 365 with the Apple's iCloud.
Apple is joining the cloud battle by introducing iCloud, the document management platform in the cloud. Google is already the market leader with it's Google Docs and now Microsoft is about to release the Office 365. iCloud is sure to pose a big challenge to the Google Docs and Office 365.What is iCloud?
iCloud is the cloud based document management platform, part of iOS 5, which is yet to be released. iOS 5 is expected sometime the fall this year.
All your documents from your iPad and iPhone will get pushed wirelessly to the iCloud. Then it will be synchronized with your other Apple products. This way, you can have your documents, photos, music, books, contacts, photos and mails shared in all your Apple devices, seamlessly.
As of now, iCloud is a free service which allow up to 5B per user. Your purchased music and other iTune products are not counted towards this space limit, so you have a lot to store your documents.Compare iCloud with Office 365
Office 365 is a larger suit of products, but iCloud is a online document management and sharing system.
Office 365 includes:
Exchange for Mail
Sharepoint
Lync for chat and communication
Online editing and management of documents, spreadsheets and presentations
iCloud offers:
iCloud is typically a document synchronization system. You can share documents, music, books, photos, calendar, mails, contacts and files between your Apple devices. When you create a document, you can store them in the cloud and they will be available to view or edit from any of your Apple devices.
iCloud will be available for third party Apps to manage the files to do various tasks like add items to calendar, edit documents etc.
iClouds can backup your data automatically and allow easy restoration when you need. The following data are included in the iCloud backups:Compare iCloud with Office 365 and Google Docs
iCloud offers a limited set of functionality offered by Microsoft's Office 365. Office 365 is a larger suit of products, and iCloud offers the document management and backup part of it.
iCloud can be compared to the Google Docs, which is part of the Google Apps family. Google apps can be compared with the Office 365 suit of products. Google Docs offers document management in the cloud which is very similar to the services offered by iCloud.
A significant difference in iCloud is, they are primarily useful to synchronize data between your Apple devices and to take automatic backup of your files from your Apple devices. Office 365 and Google Docs are not synced with any specific hardware devices, rather they are for online document management and can be accessed from any computers, laptops and other devices.