Office 365
The idea is that increasing simplicity yields greater productivity. When the technology gets out of the way and you can focus on your job, you become more productive. Try using a typewriter instead of a Word processor. Whoever thought copy and paste would be such a game changer?
Access from anywhere with Office 365
Accessing your enterprise software over the Internet has some big advantages. For one, all you need is your computer — desktop, laptop, tablet, or phone — and an Internet connection or phone coverage. Because the software is running in a Microsoft data center, you simply connect to the Internet to access the software.
Another benefit of accessing centrally located data is that you always have a single source of the truth. If you make a change to a document from your tablet at home and then your colleague views the file from their phone, they will see the most up-to-date document. Gone are the days of e-mailing Excel documents between machines with long file names.
With SharePoint Online (part of the Office 365 package) a single file lives out in the cloud (meaning in Microsoft’s globally distributed billion dollar data centers). Because the document lives in the cloud, the security permissions can be set up to allow anyone in the organization, regardless of geographic location, to view the document.
Security can be as strict or as lenient as desired. For example, you may want everyone in the organization to be able to see a company policy document but only want a select group of individuals to edit the document. In addition, SharePoint takes care of all the versioning and even lets you check out a document to edit so that nobody else can edit it at the same time.
Need to collaborate on the document in real time? No problem. You can do that by using nothing more than your web browser.
Office 365 hasn’t changed your comfort one bit. The only difference is that now they are seamlessly connected to the enterprise software living out in the cloud. In other words, your favorite applications are “cloudified”.
One of the coolest features about SharePoint 2010 and Office 2010 is that you can work with SharePoint without ever having to leave the Office applications. For example, you can fire up Word, check out a document stored in SharePoint, make some changes, check it back in, review versions, and even leave some notes for your colleagues. All without even having to know that SharePoint is handling the content management functionality behind the scenes.
Microsoft takes on all the responsibility for security and reliability. Microsoft has gone out of its way to create an unprecedented level of control for administrators, in a simple and intuitive manner.