Microsoft Office 365 - What It Means To Your Business
About Microsoft's new Office 365 service, and what it means to small business.
Microsoft Office 365 is Microsoft's newest entry in the Office series of products. It is a cloud-based platform, which means that all of the programs are stored and accessible online, rather than being on a local hard drive.
When we say "Office in a Cloud", the first thing you may think of is simply having the usual Office programs – Excel, Word, etc. – hosted on the web instead of on your hard drive. While this is the case (though some subscriptions to Microsoft Office 365 allow for hard drive downloads of these basic programs), Office 365 promises to greatly expand on this core functionality to make itself an "all in one" solution to your professional consultancy or small business.
Let's take a look at what Microsoft Office 365 offers over the traditional versions of the program:
Available anywhere:
As with all cloud programs, one of Office 365's big "claims to fame" is that you can use its services anywhere – on any of your computers (home or work), your mobile devices, your tablet, and much more. Rather than having to worry about what files and programs are on which computer, now all of your computers are on exactly the same page with one another.
This also means that your Microsoft Exchange data, including contacts, emails and calendars are also always in sync with one another, no matter what platform you're viewing them on.
Collaborative access:
Let's imagine that you have an Excel document you're working on with other people in your business. In the past, each person would make changes and then email it along to another – a chain that leads to terrible version control issues, errors, and much more.
With Office 365, users can edit Excel spreadsheets with others in real time. All changes are tracked and documented, so you can always be sure you're working on the latest version of the Excel file, every time.
Safety and security:
One concern we hear from customers is on cloud security – how safe is our data if it's not sitting on our hard drives? Will it always be accessible?
Microsoft, in its marketing literature, promises a "99.9% Uptime Guarantee". In addition to that, Office 365 builds on the security protocols that Microsoft has had in place for many years with their widely used Office Exchange servers. So rather than trusting your data to a new program, you're actually benefiting from many years of proven security.
Microsoft also offers its Service Level Agreement, which it backs with financial milestones. Lastly, Microsoft promises that Office 365's servers are geo-redundant with multiple datacenters, so even if one area of the service runs into issues, your data will keep being accessible through the redundancies.
Subscription plans:
Rather than offering a one-time flat fee, Office 365 is a subscription-based program. The subscription levels vary based on the level of service required, and begin at $2 per user, per month and scale up to $27 per user, per month.
In conclusion:
Microsoft Office 365 represents an exciting new direction for the Office products, and small businesses should definitely pay close attention to it as a new way of bringing their business closer together. With Microsoft Office still being the market leader in office productivity software, this may be a cost effective option for many small businesses out there.
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