Microsoft Office 365 Overview 2018 – Perfect Productivity Suite
Know Excel? Powerpoint? MS Word? I guess these are a couple of applications that every technical/non-technical user has gone through at least once in their lifetime. Now, these utilities are a small part of an integrated suite and what is that? Microsoft Office, of course!
MS Office 365 is a giant productivity suite that consists of much more than just a couple of applications. It is a whole intelligent package providing robust security and collaboration features to individual users as well as businesses. Microsoft takes care of its users’ convenience by providing cloud computing, leaving behind the traditional old-school desktop offerings. SharePoint Online, Exchange Online, Lync Online etc. are the best cloud accesses that eliminate the need for retrieving emails, documents, and other data. And that too without the need for an enormous IT department.
Here, we are going to explore what Office 365 is and how useful it can be for multiple purposes. Let’s analyze all the facts and perks of Office 365 aka Exchange Online!!
MS Office 365 2018 – Features and Facts
So, we will be dividing the Office 365 features and benefits into three sections - core, cloud computing, and Office 365 plans respectively.
Core Features of Office 365
Starting off with the basic features of O365.
- Traditional Office Applications
The most familiar MS Office applications are there in O365, like MS Excel, MS Word, MS Outlook, PowerPoint and many more. These all fall into this traditional category. One advantage of these all is the “offline access” (although the updates are available for the purpose of collaboration).
- Web Apps of Office 365
You got more power! The offline apps Word, OneNote, Powerpoint, Outlook etc. are available with the online versions as well.
- Mobile Access of Office
Needless to say, plenty of apps are available on the mobile phone for Android phones, Windows, iPhones, and iPad devices.
Now, moving ahead to explore what more has Office 365 offered with Cloud access!
Insight to Office 365 Cloud Service
Let’s have a look at the promising cloud services of Office 365.
- Exchange
The need for a dedicated server gets eliminated due to the cloud hosting of Exchange and Outlook accounts. All you need is just a web page, through which you will administrate and run the accounts remotely. All the data items are stored remotely including emails, contacts, calendar entries with robust security.
- One Drive
The cloud storage component of Office 365 is OneDrive, which formerly used to be SkyDrive. It's used for sharing files, backups, collaboration, storing data in cloud and sync files across multiple mobile devices like Android, Windows Phone, iOS or computer systems like MAC and Windows.
- SharePoint Online
The major cloud service that justifies collaboration is SharePoint Online. It's primarily for organizations, to collaborate with team members, colleagues, customers, partners etc. SharePoint Online provides facilities like File sharing, content management, information sharing, external sharing (exchange information among inside as well as outside the organization). SkyDrive Pro is the main feature of SharePoint Online providing users control over the organization.
- Lync
Who says MS Office is no fun! Lync is there for communication, instant messaging, audio/video calls and much more stuff. Through Lync, users can share presentations, not only one-to-one, but group sharing as well. My personal favorite feature of Lync is its capability to amalgamate with Outlook accounts and update our status automatically.
Office 365 Plans and Pricing
Talking about the plans and pricing of Office 365 suite, it varies from package to package. There are Office 365 Home & Personal plans. These two plans are just one-time payment plans. The Office 365 business plans come with a subscription of a monthly payment. These 3 business plans are Small business, Medium size business, and Enterprise level business plans. The price factor ranges from $5 to $25 per users per month.
The user limit for Small businesses is 25 users, while for medium businesses it changes to 300 users. On the other hand, Enterprise level plans have unlimited users limit. More features of Office 365 packages can be compared on the official site of Microsoft.
Bottom Line
Well, this was a complete yet compact MS Office 365 overview with features and services. Undoubtedly, Office 365 is an ideal productivity suite to lift up the productivity of many running or start-up organizations, with minimal expenditure. Being flexible and vast at the same time, Office 365 can be a real gem for most of the businesses.