I run a one person plus virtual staff business from New Zealand, with much of my work in the APAC region. Internet connectivity in both regions is variable, but for the vast majority, still very much inferior to the connectivity in Redmond. I used to use Groove 2007, and it worked. But moving with the times, I upgraded to, and loved, MS Office Live Small Business, but it was retired as a free product. I followed advice from MS. Bought MS 365 - and found I had significantly less functionality, for which I had to pay. Hundreds of hours spent trying to work out how to use what I was paying for. Whilst some of the MS tech support staff were as helpful as they could be, I was consistently advised to seek the help of a MS Cloud Partner. I visited in person the only two of these in the city where I live, and was told that they only accept business from larger companies - so back to the online forums.
On advice of MS support, I bought Office 2010 Pro Plus, in order to get Sharepoint Workspace - which would allow me to keep offline copies of Sharepoint Workspaces on laptops etc which would sync with the cloud-based workspaces - which is much more appropriate for the poor internet connections I have 90% of the time (not just at home, but almost everywhere in Asia unless you are in a premises with a business grade connection). It's so confusing and I have not yet got this working. (My background is as a systems architect in IT (albeit a few years ago), so I'm not completely technically illiterate!)
Recently, I logged-in to MS 365, and received a message to upgrade to Office 2013. - Which I thought would be an improvement on 2010, and, I hoped, would allow me to implement the offline / cloud Workspace syncing that is the only way to use 365 if you are living with the relatively poor internet connectivity that most of us have available.
I now read that Sharepoint Workspace is not provided, I read arguments between different parts of MS about whether it is even possible for it to co-exist with Office 2013.
So, I'm paying a subscription, I do not have any of the features I'm paying for, and there appears to be nobody who can help (including MS moderators in this forum).
I am certain my requirement is typical of millions of small businesses. Could MS not just spend a few hours to write a simple guide to help people like me? references to hundreds of MS knowledge base articles which may or may not be relevant, or even accurate, is not helpful. At the moment, the best option looks like cancelling all MS subscriptions and paying a modest fee to Dropbox for a simple, albeit clunky solution. The MS offer should be perfect, but it is inaccessible for small businesses.
Please MS - either tell us that small businesses are not welcome and refund our subscriptions, or support us.
chris@galdac.com