Our latest video is a quick overview of Office 365. Office 365 is Microsoft’s cloud offering of its traditional Office suite of business applications. Instead of purchasing a desktop version of Office 2016 for every employee, you can instead have a month-to-month (or year-to-year, depending on the plan) SAAS subscription to the applications for each user.
All of the same business applications you’re familiar with–like MS Office, PowerPoint, Excel–are included in Office 365. Your business will need a fast internet connection to access the online versions of these programs, but for almost all businesses today, that connection is not an issue. In addition, Office 365 subscriptions come with downloadable versions of the full desktop applications, which allow users to work when there is no internet connection.
Office 365 offers an increasing number of collaboration apps and capabilities that aren’t present only in the desktop offering. Microsoft has been responding to not only the competition from Google Apps, but also from start-ups like Slack. Some of these capabilities include ‘Groups’ for working together in email in Outlook and internal company communication tools like Yammer and Skype for Business. Some really interesting tools like Delve and Power BI are also allowing more robust examination and presentation of company (and even external internet) data.
Obviously, like with all SAAS offerings, one of the big attractions is the pricing and automatic updates. There’s no large capital expenditure for licenses at the outset and the software is always up-to-date–no need to purchase new licenses in a few years. Another nice benefit is that Office 365 is really Office anywhere–it can be installed and accessed across all of your employees’ BYOD devices and access and security can be controlled by admin from a simple management pane.
Do you have any questions regarding Office 365 or other IT Services? Contact Magnet Solutions Group