Office 365 - It all works together

Microsoft Office 365 provides the business world’s most-recognized productivity and collaboration tools in one integrated cloud service:

Microsoft Office – Millions of people use Outlook, Word, and Excel every day. Microsoft Office also includes other familiar applications that help people be productive, such as Publisher and PowerPoint.

Microsoft SharePoint – Collaboration is often how work gets done in the workplace. SharePoint provides a place for coworkers to keep and modify commonly held documents, so multiple versions aren’t floating around in e-mail unsynchronized as different people work on their own versions of a shared document.

Microsoft Exchange – This is the engine behind Outlook and other applications that handles the distribution and storage of e-mail messages, file attachments, contact lists, etc.

Microsoft Lync – Replacing and superseding Microsoft Office Communications Server and Office Communicator, Lync is the most recent unified communications package from Microsoft that brings together instant messaging, phone calls, teleconferencing, video conferencing, and more.

There are several advantages for a business that deploys Office 365 instead of running the same tools on-premises:

Predictable pricing – Office 365 subscriptions are invoiced on a per-user, per-month basis.

Easy scalability – There is no theoretical limit to the number of users that can be served by cloud software. Businesses of any size, from one user to tens of thousands of users, have the same access to the same software. The little guy has the boon of being able to deploy enterprise-level business software for the cost of one user subscription. The large corporation has the advantage of being able to demand as many seats as needed and deploy the technology almost immediately. Both have the ability to change the number of seats over time, scaling up or down, simply by changing the number of seats in the subscription.

No upgrade hassles – Because the software resides on the server side, users never have to install the software on their local computers. That also means users never have to upgrade that software on their computers. Instead, Microsoft performs the upgrades directly at the server end, transparently to users. The most recent software is always immediately accessible from any internet-enabled computer. That also means that all users use the same software at all times, eliminating the staggered upgrade rollouts businesses used to have to endure when upgrades necessarily had to be performed onsite by an IT team, one computer at a time.

Reduced internal IT load – Your internal IT department doesn’t have to worry about installing software, making upgrades, or resolving installation conflicts because the software is accessed via the internet and upgrades are performed directly at the server end by Microsoft. That means your IT personnel can concentrate on other issues, such as provisioning new employees with computers at their desks and making sure they are connected to the internet.

Reduced hardware footprint – By utilizing cloud services over the internet, businesses eliminate the need of maintaining their own on-site server rooms to run the software locally. This eliminates the fixed outlay of purchasing server hardware upfront as well as the ongoing costs of maintaining the hardware and providing the square footage to house the hardware.

Reduced carbon footprint – An independent study found that the cloud is green. Businesses can not only reduce their own electrical power consumption by not maintaining their own servers locally but also, surprisingly, reduce their employees’ electrical consumption indirectly at the server end. This is true because the data centers that provide cloud software over the internet are able to intelligently and automatically bring additional server hardware online or take it offline throughout the day as demand changes hour-by-hour or minute-by-minute. This means on average each user who is not actively using the software is not requiring a data center to use some amount of electricity. In contrast, a business running its own local server would have to keep that server running even if only one person were using it, wasting the power required to provide that potential usability to other users who are currently idle.

Please contact xRM.com to have a representative get back to you about Office 365.