There are a handful of tools that almost every business needs: email, calendar, live chat, to-do lists, Microsoft documents, spreadsheets, presentations, and file sharing. While there is a wide range of tools for each of these programs, or for most of them, Office 365 takes care of everything at the same time.
That was easy… the only problem was that before you had to mount your own Exchange server for email and calendar sync, along with perhaps a Sharepoint installation for collaboration and file sharing. Those services were much more complicated to install and run than individual Office applications and were a considerable investment in servers and software.
Microsoft Office 365 features
- Manage email, calendar, file sharing and Office apps in one place.
- Full Exchange email with retention policies, remote deletion and other security tools.
- Plan team agendas in collaborative calendars and to-do lists.
- Collaborate on Office and files with OneDrive for Business and Office Online.
- IOS, Android, Mac, Windows and web applications available.
To keep things simple, Microsoft started launching hosted versions of its software in 2008, so you can simply pay a monthly email hosting fee instead of running Exchange yourself. Today, all Office tools, from Word, Excel, and the other applications you install on your PC from Exchange, SharePoint, and other server-based tools, are part of Office 365 . Instead of setting up a server and manage everything by hand, the subscription of Office 365 lets you get applications Office installable and services Office online for a monthly fee per user.
They are all your basic business tools in one package. The main Office 365 plans (Business Essentials and Business Premium) include email, calendar, sites, and other features that you previously had to run on Exchange and Sharepoint . These options allow you to add your own domain names to Office 365 to professionally manage your email and calendars. You can receive email and add events online in the Outlook Web App interface, or sync them with Outlook on your computer or with any other email tool that supports Exchange, IMAP, or POP3. There are advanced online tools, too, so you can send vacation responses, automatically order email, and more.
The new Clutter tool can be especially helpful: Watch your inbox for new email messages that are probably not important to you and move them to a separate folder to help you focus on the most important email messages. If you just want to count Office software (no Email) on your computers and OneDrive online sync files, the business plan offers just that for a more collaborative option than traditional office software.
With this or any of the above plans, you can sync files from your computer and share them online with your team, or use Office Web Apps to view and edit Word documents, Excel spreadsheets, and PowerPoint presentations from your browser.
There are also new Office plug-ins to connect your files to other popular software, to automatically collect data in Excel spreadsheets and then sync them to your computer with OneDrive.
Regardless of the Office 365 plan you choose, you can manage each of its users from the Office 365 online portal, where you can see how many copies of Office are install, So much storage is being used.
If you need more features, upgrade it
- The traditional boxed version of Office was easy to install once, but collaborating or using Office on multiple computers was always a toothache.
- Office 365, This is the software you need for your business, along with email, calendars, websites, and more to patchup with your team and without ever having to manage an Exchange server on your own.
- You’ll get all the same features, with much less hassle.
- And with new Office add-ons, you can do more tasks and add other new tools to your workflow more easily.