OFFICE 365

OFFICE 365

Office 365 is your complete office in the cloud, It brings together the feature-rich communication and collaboration tools of Microsoft applications to enable you to work anytime, anyplace.

With high availability, comprehensive security and unified IT management, Microsoft Office 365 helps maximise your technology investment bringing greater mobility, increased productivity and better business continuity.

  • Get more done
  • Work Better together
  • Build your business
  • Safeguard your data
  • Simplied for you

Features

Outlook

The email service, task management, calendar application, and contacts manager included with business and enterprise Office 365 subscriptions are under the Outlook on the web brand. It includes Outlook Mail, Outlook Calendar, Outlook People, and Outlook Tasks.

Microsoft introduced an email feature called Clutter with Office 365. Clutter remembers user’s preferences as it comes to the relevance and importance of emails. It analyses user’s pattern of behavior about email topics, if user keeps ignoring emails about a certain topic, Clutter moves those emails to a folder with the same name in Outlook. Users can enable and disable this feature by logging on to Office 365 portal.

Hosted services
Business and enterprise-oriented plans for Office 365 offer access to cloud-hosted versions of Office’s server platforms on a software as a service basis, including Exchange, Skype for Business, SharePoint, and the browser-based Office Web Apps suite. Through SharePoint’s OneDrive for Business functionality (formerly known as SharePoint MySites and SkyDrive Pro, and distinct from the consumer-oriented OneDrive service), each user also receives 1 TB of online storage. Certain plans also include unlimited personal cloud storage per user. In lieu of Microsoft’s enterprise software, Home plans for Office 365 include premium enhancements for Microsoft’s consumer-level online services, including 1 terabyte of OneDrive storage for each user, along with 60 minutes of phone calls per month on the Microsoft-owned Skype VoIP service.
Office applications

Some plans for Office 365 also include access to the current versions of the Office desktop applications for both Windows (Office 2016) and macOS (Office for Mac 2016) for the period of the subscription. In the case of Office 2016 on Windows, it is installed using a “click-to-run” system which allows users to begin using the applications almost instantaneously while files are streamed in the background. Updates to the software are installed automatically, covering both security updates and major new versions of Office. If an Office 365 subscription lapses, the applications enter a read-only mode where editing functionality is disabled. Full functionality is restored once a new subscription is purchased and activated. Publisher, Access and InfoPath are available on Windows only, and are not available for install on Mac operating systems.

Collaboration tools

Office 365 includes several productivity applications that are designed to cover collaboration needs at the organizational, departmental and team levels. Currently, the list of collaboration tools includes OneDrive for Business, SharePoint Online, Microsoft Teams, Yammer, Skype for Business, Outlook Online and Delve boards. The wide choice of tools is the source of ongoing debates about the purpose of each tool and their optimal application in real business life.

There are several approaches to defining the role of Office 365 collaboration tools in an organization. Key aspects that influence the choice of a certain tool are particular communication needs, team size, project specifics, as well as employees’ preferences.

Updates

The Office 365 platform uses a rolling release model; updates to the online components of the service are provided once per quarter. On launch, the 2010 versions of server components were used with Office 365. These services were automatically upgraded to their Office 2013 counterparts upon its release in February 2013. With the introduction of Office 2013, Office division head Kurt DelBene stated that minor and incremental updates to the Office desktop software would be provided on a similarly periodic basis to all Office 365 users by means of the streaming system, as opposed to the three-year cycle for major releases of Office that had been used in the past.

Microsoft began to deploy Office 2016 in September 2015.

Office 365 Education

Office 365 Education, formerly Office 365 for Education and Microsoft Live@edu, is a free suite of hosted Microsoft services and applications that is intended for educational needs.

The program provides education institutions with a set of hosted collaboration services, communication tools, and mobile, desktop, and web-based applications, as well as data storage capabilities. The suite includes Microsoft applications for collaboration including: Office Live Workspace, Windows Live SkyDrive, Windows Live Spaces, Microsoft SharedView Beta, Microsoft Outlook Live, Windows Live Messenger, and Windows Live Alerts.

Plans

Personal:

Includes access to Microsoft Word, Microsoft Excel, Microsoft PowerPoint, Microsoft OneNote, Microsoft Outlook, Microsoft Publisher & Microsoft Access for home/non-commercial use on one computer (PC or Mac) plus access to premium features on one tablet (Android, iOS or Windows RT, as full Windows counts as a computer) or phone.

Home:

Aimed at mainstream consumers and families; same as Personal, but for use on up to six devices by up to six users.

Business Essentials:

Offers access to hosted Exchange, SharePoint, and Lync services, and Office Online for the web-based versions of Outlook, Word, Excel, PowerPoint and OneNote.

Business:

Offers desktop apps for both Mac and PCs for up to five computers per user, without online services Exchange, SharePoint and Lync Online.

Business Premium:

A combination of Business and Business Essentials plans.

ProPlus:

Offers access to the Office 2016 Professional Plus applications on up to five devices per user.

Midsize Business:

Aimed at businesses with 10-300 employees. Offered access to the Office 2013 applications from ProPlus, plus hosted Exchange, SharePoint, and Skype for Business services. No longer available.

Enterprise:

Intended for use in enterprise environments. Offers access to all Office applications, hosted Exchange, SharePoint, and Skype for Business services, plus enterprise-specific legal compliance features and support.

Enterprise:

Intended for use in enterprise environments. Offers access to all Office applications, hosted Exchange, SharePoint, and Skype for Business services, plus enterprise-specific legal compliance features and support.