What is Office 365 ?

by | Dec 3, 2015 | Blog, Office 365, Social Media

What is Office 365?

You’ve probably heard a lot of talk about Office 365, not only from us at Jolly IT, but also from your friendly high street retailer, trying to sell you licenses and trying to get you to ‘migrate’ onto it.

It all gets a bit confusing, because we all kind of know what “Microsoft Office” is – its Word, Excel, Outlook and Power point right ? Oh, and some other stuff which doesn’t get used a lot! (have you used OneNote..? its great!)

Microsoft is now in the process of launching ‘Office 2016’ on the PC. You can still buy a box from a shop with a copy of Office in. Or a card with a download link and a license key anyway.

So what’s Office 365 got to do with it..?

Well… Office 365 is  Microsoft’s collective term for a whole basket of Cloud based tools. You can also rent, yes rent, a copy of ‘Microsoft Office 2016’ from the Office 365 website by paying a monthly fee.

In a nutshell, you log into the Office 365 website, and depending on how many of the components you are paying for, you get a more and more comprehensive set of business tools. These are:

  1. Exchange email – That’s email with calendar, contacts, tasks and notes
  2. One Drive for Business – that’s a bit like the OneDrive you get with windows, but better and with ‘unlimited’ storage. (Some restrictions apply)
  3. MS Office for your computer (as above)
  4. A version of MS Office which runs in a browser – Or ‘Office Online’ This is quite good because you can edit a document stored online alongside other people anywhere in the world, and watch as they edit it and they can also watch you!
  5. Sharepoint – this is a very complex product which is like an internal website, for storing all your company stuff in a more interesting way than in a folder/file list. The keyword here is ‘Share’. you can share certain things to outside organisations too.
  6. Skype for business – Its like Skype, but for your business! But seriously, it is. from the start you can only see other people in your business in the skype window – you can add other ‘normal’ Skype people though.
  7. Lots of other stuff that you’ll have to call us about!!!

The important thing to take away from this is … You can now have the same tools as big multi-nationals used to spend hundreds of thousands of pounds on, all for the cost of a couple of drinks, per month.

Its almost so easy to use and administer that its hard for us to understand why anyone wouldn’t use it! – We do.

So call our London or Sheffield office, on freephone 0800 3317668, or email us on info@jollyit.co.uk  – We would be very happy to hold your hand through the whole process of getting set up, or as we like to call it – migrating.

We look forward to hearing from you!