What is Office 365?

Hello and welcome to the MessageOps Getting started with Office 365 tutorial. This suite of online services provides enterprise class services offered as a subscription from Microsoft. These kinds of services are often called cloud services, which means that services like email are delivered from the Internet rather than using system and services hosted at your business. Your company has decided to move its services to Office365 and you may have questions or concerns about what this means. MessageOps will answer those in our Getting Started tutorial. This tutorial is designed to introduce you to Office365 so you can understand what to expect as well as how to take advantage of its easy to use features. I'll show you that you may already know how to use Office365 because it's based on familiar Microsoft Services and Microsoft Office. We'll also look at some features that may be new to you. The goal of this tutorial is to define and describe cloud services and to show what you can expect after you've moved to the cloud. In this class, we'll look at some new features you will use and we'll see how you can access the services when traveling. We'll also look at several of the key services and show how easy it is to take advantage of some new useful features. First, let's discuss what it means to be in the cloud. Cloud service refers to any application or service that is accessible on the Internet. You may wonder why cloud services aren't called Internet services or Web services. The term cloud comes from a technical name used to describe a type of computer network as opposed to a local network. A cloud network carries public computer traffic through a series of switches. Data from your computer goes into the cloud along with the traffic from many other systems and is routed to its destination. The Internet is a cloud network, so services hosted on the Internet can accurately be called cloud services. You may already use many Internet services such as Internet search engines, movie listings, online stores, and blogs. Internet services have evolved beyond personal use. Many businesses are looking to host their required services in the cloud. Very small businesses are often on tight budgets. Free services are attractive because they are generally reliable, widely available, and at no cost. These kinds of services work well, but are often based on inserted advertisements and target it for personal use rather than business use. For example, most free consumer based services don't offer support 24 hours a day, seven days a week. Having a custom email domain is an easy next step and communicates a more professional image to prospective customers. Many domain name providers let you purchase a custom domain name and use a POP3 provider or basic email service that allows more features. However, these services rarely implement full Outlook calendaring features, resource sharing, presence and and document collaboration. As a result, small businesses must often add a variety of different services to complete a suite that provides the services that their businesses need. As a business grows, using free or public services becomes unfeasible. It's hard to project a professional business image when using free online services. Businesses at this stage often provide these services in house, which provides total control of the service and services. It also requires responsibility for the costs of maintenance, updates, security, backups and availability on premises. Systems like SharePoint and Exchange Server provide great capabilities and enable document collaboration, distribution lists, conference room scheduling, email, and more. In addition, these servers use Active Directory, a centralized directory service from Microsoft that allows IT management to configure and control users and desktops. For example, with Active Directory, administrators can see all users in the company without leaving Outlook. This can help small businesses increase productivity as they grow. In addition, these servers can grow and scale to serve enterprise sized workloads. Over time, more on premises services are added which increases the complexity and ongoing costs for maintaining on premises systems. Servers have become more powerful and software has become more capable, while Internet service providers deliver greater bandwidth and improved reliability. These factors enable Microsoft to offer a suite of cloud based services that provides many of the core services you expect from on premises systems. As a result, many businesses are considering moving key services that provide messaging, document collaboration, instant messaging and online conferencing off premises and into the cloud. Your company has decided to move its services from in house or from their current providers to Microsoft Office 365. This means that services that were once provided on premises or through another service provider are now hosted by Microsoft. Microsoft data centers host your data in a high tech environment that provides data storage, backup, virus scanning, spam filtering and support services. These multimillion dollar data centers meet high standards earning ISO 2001 and other certifications which are only granted when an independent data assessment ensures that data centers are run to an exacting, well defined standard of operations. Among other certifications, Microsoft data centers comply with the requirements set forth in the EU Safe Harbor Framework Reg. Data Privacy the exacting standards and practices for security and compliance in Microsoft data centers set a high bar that is hard to exceed. In addition to these practices, the services come with a 99.9% availability guarantee that ensures that your services are available when you need them. As you can see, Microsoft Office 365 makes the processes you are already using more seamless, making it easier to collaborate. In the following tutorials, we will provide you with a step by step visual explanation of how to use and maximize the features in Microsoft Office 365.