Office 365

Most of us use Microsoft Office in our daily activities to view and create email and calendar events (Outlook), to create and share documents (Word), for basic or complex spreadsheets (Excel), for sales presentations (PowerPoint), or to analyze and manage large amounts of data (Access).

Since the first release in 1990, the Microsoft Office suite has evolved into a robust set of tools to increase our productivity. Fifteen revisions later, today’s Office is widely used across organizations of all types and sizes. Let’s take a look at the numbers:

• More than 1.2 billion people use Office. That’s 1 in 7 people on the planet*
• Office for iPad and iPhone apps have been downloaded more than 80 million times*
• Office 365 Home and Personal have a combined 9.2 million subscribers*
• Eighty percent of the Fortune 500 are on the Microsoft Cloud*

What is Office 365?

Office 365 refers to subscription plans that combine the same familiar Microsoft Office suite with cloud-based communication, collaboration and storage solutions including Microsoft Exchange, SharePoint, Skype and OneDrive.

What are the benefits?

Benefits differ from one organization to the next, but the primary benefits include:

• Get product updates and features as they become available
• Available on your desktop/laptop/tablet/Android/iPhone
• Portability to access shares and information for your remote workforce
• Collaboration tools to streamline communications
• Ability to work virtually anywhere on the Internet
• Highly scalable and can support any size organization

Why make the switch?

There are many reasons to consider switching. Some businesses move to Office 365 to reduce costs. Others simply want to standardize to one version of Office. Some make the switch to increase business productivity through the combined use of OneDrive, SharePoint and Skype for Business. Another catalyst is to increase uptime and availability of your Exchange email server.

To learn more about Office 365 and whether it’s right for your organization give us a call at 952-516-7900.

*Statistics provided by Microsoft by the Numbers.