I’ve been struggling recently coming up with good stories for my blog. I’ve got lists of suggestions but nothing seemed to click inside me. And then God sent me – Office365! 
Actually he sent me a local building contractor who had previously used Office Live Small Business (OLSB) for their website and wanted help in making sense of their impending move to Office365. (In hindsight using OLSB to host their site probably wasn’t the best idea but of course it was free so they jumped onboard.)
They started receiving notices in earnest about the planned closure of OLSB about 6 weeks before the May 1 deadline. They tried to follow the steps as provided to them by Microsoft and got as far as transferring their domain registration to MelbourneIT. But then everything stopped as things got ever more complex and complicated.
They hired me to try and help them through the last steps of the transfer to Office365 but we mutually agreed that they had left it too late. By my estimation it was going to takes days and days of my time to transfer all their web pages individually – as per the instruction given to them by MS. 26 pages of instructions!
We agreed that the best option was just to transfer everything to another host company and start from scratch – giving them a more modern looking site plus the ability later on tom move it, edit it and transfer it without being beholden to MS.
Turns out my clients weren’t the only people severely inconvenienced by this transfer – PC World reports that
“Frustrated small business owners are struggling with a variety of technical issues, including lengthy delays in the process of verifying ownership of the Internet domains they’re transferring from OLSB to Office 365 and other third-party hosts, according to posts made on the official OLSB Community site, the official Office 365 Facebook page,discussion forums, social media sites and blogs.”
Here’s a wonderful selection of posts from their Facebook page
Office 365 is absolutely great, by moving away from Office Live Small Business to the bigger more expensive domain, you pay 10 times for the same crap.
Now my comment has disappeared!!!!! This is getting better.
I’m unable to transfer website onto your new 365. I’d appreciate it if someone could give me instructions to do so because at present it appears the only way to do it is to pay someone, which I’m not doing seeing as I paid for the website for 2 years, yet because of this change over I’m only getting 1!!!! Just seems like a money making scheme to be honest!!!Free T-shirt? Sure, then I can punch myself in the throat and salvage at least some pleasure from the last day and a half.
Do you have an OLSB-to-Office365 story to tell? Please relate it here.
Posted by John Tully
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