Windows Phone 8

I'll say it up front: I like Windows Phone 8. I like it so much I've considered letting it replace my iPhone 4s after I drowned it demonstrating a favorite watersport. That's unlikely just because so much of my personal media, not to mention my favorite phone wallet, are invested in iPhone. However, WP8 does everything I need it to and most of what I want it to do.

Some things are odd. I'd testing driving a Nokia Lumia 925, and Nokia pus plenty of their own apps on there. So, there's AT&T's Navigator app, Nokia's Here apps, Bing Maps, and now I've added Google Maps. Nokia has their own camera app, and their own 'photobeaming', which is really just uploading a file to an anonymous share and sending the link.

The Here transit app is cute. Driving maps are great, but while waiting a the Princeton Junction NJTransit station, I decided to see what Here would advise. I suggested that rather than take the express train directly in to New York City, a train that was no more than ten minutes away, that I take that train to Newark, get off, and find the PATH train (a different system) instead. So that was weird. And cute, and in a way, very Microsoft.

I found an app to put my Mac's itunes playlists and photos on the phone. It works well, though someimes WP8 will tell me it can't play a song even as it starts to play.

So, perhaps I'm no making the best case for WP8, but it is pretty slick. It's responsive, customizable, as or more consistent than iOS, and simpler than any Windows OS has a right to be. I'll hold on to it and use it to replace my Galaxy S4. My iPhone and I, however, will make up and go out to the bar. WP8 and I will just be friends.

Office 365 for Enterprise

One of my projects at work - the biggest, and certainly the most visible - is migrating our email to Office 365. As part of our divestiture from our former parent company, we're migrating off an on-premise solution to the Microsoft cloud.

I won't give any details peculiar to our migration, but I'll highlight some of the talking points that have come up during migration.

It is not hard, it is not easy, but it is detailed. Especially for a large, multi-segmented enterprise, an existing on-premise environment will be very complex. Examples include if you have multiple SMTP domains, shared mailboxes or resource folders, and multiple forests or domains.

Third-party solutions require careful examination. If you have an email archiving solution, you'll want to know how to migrate those archives to the cloud; typically this is not something Microsoft will do for you. If you have an e-discovery solution, you'll want a full understanding of how that ties in to Office 365.

There are a lot of new features in Office 365, compared to most on-premise configurations. For example a huge mailbox, and OneDrive for Business. However, these new features require new governance and guidance for users. Larger mailboxes mean larger profile caches. What will your users put on their OneDrives, and how will you control sharing?

Our migration is moving forward, and I hope to have more notes on the enterprise experience next month.