What is Office 365?

With all the hype surrounding Office 365, I've noticed that most people still don't know what it is. First impressions, probably because of the name, tend to go towards it being the next version of Office, the popular desktop suite. This is partially true, as Office is part of Office 365, but not the entire story.

Office 365 comprises of 4 main products, 3 or which are Cloud-based, as follows:

• Exchange Online: this is Microsoft's enterprise level email, calendar and contacts platform, hosted and managed by Microsoft. Under Exchange Online, users get email (25GB mailbox per user) as well as calendar and contact management, including the most current antivirus and anti-span solutions to help protect your organization.
• SharePoint Online: this is Microsoft's collaboration suite, hosted and managed by Microsoft. Under SharePoint Online, businesses can create sites to share documents and insights with colleagues, partners and customers.
• Lync Online: this is Microsoft's unified communications offering, hosted and managed by Microsoft. Under Lync Online, users can meet online with PC-audio, video (including HD) conferencing and screen sharing capabilities. Lync Online can also be used for instant messaging and presence (available, busy, do not disturb, etc.) sharing.
• Office Professional Plus: this is Microsoft's popular productivity suite which can be downloaded (only downloads no other media available) and installed on up to 5 devices, Windows and/or Macs, per user.

It is important to note that, Office Professional Plus includes other features such as on-demand download; this basically means you can download Office applications (not the entire thing) on any number of Windows & Mac devices work on your documents and then when you're done, Office will remove itself automatically. You can even work on Office documents directly from the browser.

There are other products available from Microsoft as part of the Office 365 suite, however, the main four pillars are those mentioned above. Other products include:

• Project Online, and soon (unofficially speaking),
• Visio Online

Here is glance at what each of the core Office 365 products entails:

Links:

• Exchange Online: http://office.microsoft.com/en-us/exchange/microsoft-exchange-online-email-for-business-FX103739072.aspx
• SharePoint Online: http://office.microsoft.com/en-us/sharepoint/online-collaboration-software-sharepoint-online-FX103789366.aspx
• Lync Online: http://office.microsoft.com/en-us/lync/webinar-software-lync-online-features-FX103789571.aspx
• Project Online: http://office.microsoft.com/en-us/project/online-project-management-software-project-online-FX103802026.aspx