Office 365–It is more than Office!

2010 would be known as year of Office.  Microsoft released Office 2010 on June 15, 2010 and then a few months later, Mac users get Office for Mac 2011 on Oct 26, 2010.  Recently, Microsoft announced a new product, Office 365, the company’s next generation in cloud productivity suite.

What is Office 365?  It is a suite that bundles Microsoft Office Professional Plus, Office Web Apps, Microsoft Business Productivity Online Suite (BPOS) which includes Exchange Online, SharePoint Online, Office Live Meeting, and Office Communications Online, and Office Live Small Business which provides free web hosting and website.  Office 365 has a very long list of features.

And unlike most other Microsoft products; we don’t buy Office 365.  We pay a very small subscription monthly premium (as small as US$ 6).  We can subscribe 1 license or 1,000,000+ licenses; so Office 365 is for any business, from entrepreneur to global enterprises.

Office 365 has 3 different plans, namely Small Business, Enterprise and Education.  I am going to discuss more details about Small Business and Enterprise plans.

Office 365 for small business

The subscription monthly premium is US$6.  It includes:

• Office Web Apps web productivity applications
• Exchange Online for email, mobile access, calendar, contacts , anti-virus, anti-spam
• SharePoint Online for team sites, Access services, and an easy-to-build public website
• Lync Online for instant messaging and online meetings

Benefits

• Anywhere-access to email, important documents, contacts, and calendar on nearly any device, including PC, Mac, Windows Phone, iPhone, Android, and BlackBerry
• Office Web Apps for viewing, editing and sharing documents
• Large 25 GB mailboxes for each user and the ability to send attachments up to 25 MB
• Easy-to-use design tools to build a professional-looking website quickly
• Create sites to share documents securely with colleagues, customers and partners
• Industry-leading, always-up-to-date anti-virus and anti-spam solutions
• Integrated IM and presence, as well as online meetings with audio/video conferencing and multiparty data sharing
• Financially-backed, guaranteed 99.9% service uptime
• 24×7 moderated community-based support

 

Office 365 for Enterprise

The subscription monthly premium is US$24.  It includes:

• Office Professional Plus desktop software
• Office Web Apps web productivity applications
• Exchange Online for email, mobile access, calendar, discovery, anti-virus, anti-spam, as well as advanced capabilities for voice mail, unified messaging, and compliance archiving
• SharePoint Online for advanced portals for collaboration and advanced capabilities including Forms, Access, Visio & Excel services
• Lync Online for IM and online meetings
• On-premises licenses
• Control and management features 
  
  

  Benefits

• Large 25 GB mailboxes and the ability to send attachments up to 25 MB
• Financially-backed, guaranteed 99.9% uptime Service Level Agreement
• 24/7, IT-level support over the phone, the web or email
• Single sign on capabilities with Active Directory deployment
• Latest version of Office Professional Plus – connecting users to communication and collaboration services (with certain plans)
• Office Web Apps for viewing, sharing and minor editing of documents directly from our browser (with certain plans)
• Industry-leading, always-up-to-date antivirus and anti-spam solutions
• Integrated IM and presence, as well as online meetings with audio and video conferencing and multiparty data sharing
• Team sites to share documents, task lists, and schedules to keep workgroups in sync

Conclusion

With Office 365, we pay a monthly premium which covers the latest productivity suite (Office Professional Plus, Exchange Online, SharePoint Online, Lync Online), all future upgrades, and supports.  Microsoft’s enterprise grade infrastructure would make your IT security and business continuity / disaster recover plan much simpler.

It is also scalable; so if your office needs to expand tomorrow and has to hire 200 new employee.  Don’t worry, it can be done quickly.

What else?  I think the best way to find out its full potential for your office is try it out.  So don’t wait, sign up for beta today!

I am going to share my hand on experience on Office 365 with you, so stay tuned for my coming blogs.

Andrew Chan is the owner and founder of ALG Inc.

We help you to make better and faster decisions!