Microsoft Office 365
Overview
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MS Office 365 is a tool for emailing, sharing documents, setting up portals, webconferencing and videocalling, chatting, and creating MS Office documents (Word, Excel, Powerpoint, OneNote, ..) . And it is cheap. Every company should use this. Google is really not for companies or professional use since it does not have portals and full webconferencing and videocalling.
Our company can sit with you, and try to understand your needs regarding collaboration, communication and document management. We will recommend you the best MS Office 365 plan, and implement and maintain it if you decide to purchase it.
We guarantee you that your administrative costs will be reduced by at least 50%.
The videos below will give you an overview.
List of MS Office 365 Services
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MS Office 365 Services consists of the following services:
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MS Exchange Online for online email hosting. Click here to learn more.
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MS Sharepoint Online as a collaboration tool where you can do the following:
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Setting up site collections/portals that have:
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Private sites and subsites but that can be shared with external users. A site can be for a team, a community, publishing site, ...
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These private sites and subsites can have:
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Pages
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Document libraries that can be shared
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lists for weblinks, issues, tasks, contacts, announcements, custom lists,
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Calendars
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Discussion groups
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Blogs
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Videos
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Slides
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Applications from Microsoft and 3rd parties
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Click here to learn more.​​​
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MS Office 365 OneDrive where you can store your personal files.
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You can create your ​personal documents (MS Word, MS Excel, MS Powerpoint, MS OneNote) online while being in OneDrive.
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You can also create your personal documents from your MS Office 2016 applications on your desktop, and have them uploaded/synced automatically to/with the corresponding documents in MS Office 365 OneDrive. MS OneDrive can be accessed from any computer or any mobile device/application. OneNote is very powerful since it can include pictures, videos, and PPT slides with audio. A OneNote document will be on every device (computer or mobile).
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MS Communication Sites is basically a Sharepoint team site but with a nice home page or interface. It is private but, it can be shared with external people. This way you could use it as a landing page. But it doesn't have the web conferencing and video calling features of MS Teams. Click here to learn more.
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Microsoft Hubsites
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MS Teams for teams. They can have:
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Document libraries
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Wiki files
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Conversations where you can use:
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chat,
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voice calls, video calls and webconferencing (replacing SKype for Business). Click here to learn more.
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Links to websites
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Links to Sharepoint online portals, sites and subsites
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Tabs for Word, Excel, Powerpoint, OneNote, SmartSheet, Trello, ...
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Applications as extensions of MS Teams to communicate with 3rd party applications such as github, constant contact, AdobeSign,..
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MS Office 2016 web and desktop applications (Word, Excel, PowerPoint, OneNote, Access, Publisher, Visio)​
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The MS Office desktop applications are installed from MS Office 365 account onto your computer. Do no longer install them from CD as in the past decade. However they will only work as long as you have an active MS Office 365 account, for which you have to pay monthly or annually (starting from $6/user/mth, which is peanuts compared to all the features you get).
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Other applications​
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PowerBI to create powerful charts and maps based on Sharepoint data or external data​
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Stream where you can store recorded webconferences and video calls
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Sway​
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Sway enables you to create a simple private website for a project. You can display text, pictures, videos. and other websites to desribe your project content
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Delve​
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Delve enables you to see the files you recently accessed, to see the people (other Office 365 users in your company) you have been working with, ​to see the files and projects other people have been working on, and to blog. You can categorize the files by boards. When you store a lot files in MS Sharepoint Online during a week, you can see the recent ones in MS Sharepoint Online but not the ones of your colleagues. Therefore Delve is useful. Click here to learn more.
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eDiscovery enables you to look for any document, email, chat message, RSS feed that have certain keywords. Then you can specify access rules (read only, write, on hold, ..) to those search results, and create roles with those access rules. It enables you to restrict people from changing or reading certain material. Click here to learn more.
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MS PowerApps
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3rd party apps build for MS Office 365
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Etc.
Relationship among MS Teams, MS Office 365 Groups and MS Sharepoint Online Sites
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From MS Teams, MS Outlook and Yammer, you can connect to MS Office 365 Groups which is a group of MS Office 365 users and guests that can communicate with each other via email and share documents. Those documents are stored in MS Sharepoint Online sites and subsites together with other applications.
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The picture and video (42 mins, Setp 2017) illustrates this relationships
Videos that cover more details of MS Office 365
MS Office 365 and MS Azure Active Directory
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When you add users in MS Office 365, they are automatically created in MS Azure Active Directory.
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The video ( mins, May 2018) below will describe this.
Pricing Plan
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The MS Office 365 Office Business Premium is recommended since it has the following features;
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Business-class email with 50GB mailbox per user
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HD video conferencing needed for MS Teams
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Desktop versions of Outlook, Word, Excel, PowerPoint, OneNote, plus Access and Publisher for PC only
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1TB of OneDrive storage
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Starting from $12.50 user/month
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The other plans either miss the desktop version of Outlook, Word, etc., or the HD conferencing. Click here to compare, and here to learn more about the details of MS Office 365 Office Business Premium.
MS Office 365 Office Business Premium does include MS Sharepoint Online but with maximum one site collection. There we recommend the MS Office 365 Enterprise E3 plan.
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MS Office 365 Enterprise E3 is the preferred on since it has the following features:
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Business-class email with 50GB mailbox per user
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HD video conferencing needed for MS Teams
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Desktop versions of Outlook, Word, Excel, PowerPoint, OneNote, plus Access and Publisher for PC only
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1TB of OneDrive storage
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MS Sharepoint Online can have a large number of site collections which is needed when you have at least 5 people in the office.
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Starting from $20 user/month
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Click here to compare, and here to learn more about the details of MS Office 365 Enterprise E3 plan.
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Only the MS Office 365 Enterprise E5 plan has voice call capabilities to call other people on the Public Service Telephone Network (PSTN). This enables you to call a mobile number or a landline. If you want MS Office 365 including MS Teams with the full capability of making a PSTN call, this plan can do it, and save you a lot of money. There might be an additional charge for a hosted Session Border Controller and a SIP trunk. This plan starts at $30/user/month.
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All MS Office 365 business plans and pricing can be seen at: https://www.office365.com or here.
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All MS Office 365 enterprise plans and pricing can be seen here.
Trial
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Click on: https://signup.microsoft.com/Signup?OfferId=467eab54-127b-42d3-b046-3844b860bebf&dl=O365_BUSINESS_PREMIUM&culture=en-US&country=US&ali=1 if you want to try MS Office 365 Business Premium.
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New Features
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MS Office 365 comes out regularly with new features. Click on the weblinks below to see them.