Microsoft Office 365: Benefits and Implementation for Businesses

Abstract This project will centers on Microsoft office 365. We are going to discuss how Microsoft Office 365 have the ability to impact the business environment in a way that we never thought it was possible. In this report we will be describing Microsoft office 365, its benefits, how it will be implemented into the business, its critical assessments, course integration, and we will compare and contrast some of the review on this technology. Office 365 Table of Contents Summary4 Benefits6 Implementation Plan8 Course Integration9

Office 365 is a new offering from Microsoft that utilizes the cloud to provide online, seamless, collaboration for businesses and non-profit organizations. Office 365 contains all the familiar applications and productivity tools that everyone is already familiar with, but hosts them in a cloud environment that minimizes maintenance and storage costs while allowing individuals to work from virtually anywhere and on any device.

As a cloud-based service, Office 365 offers all the benefits you would expect from a hosted software suite. The pay-as-you-go model allows organizations to pay for only what they need at any given time by increasing and decreasing subscriptions on the fly. With highly automated maintenance, dynamic storage capabilities and deployment flexibility, local IT departments can spend less resources managing desktop software and focus their efforts on strategic initiatives. The largest impact of using the cloud-based Office 365 suite ¬will be visible to both, users and IT departments.

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Users will always have the latest features by performing upgrades behind the scenes without any interaction from local IT departments at no additional cost. Microsoft Office 365 consists of five components that are aimed at increasing the productivity of the user base. These include the Office Professional Plus, SharePoint Online, Exchange Online, Web Apps, and Lync Online. While each of those components are all cloud-based through the web, they carry the same user-interface and familiarity with the existing Microsoft offerings for desktops.

Additionally, content and documents can be transferred back and forth between the desktop applications and Office 365 applications seamlessly. First on the list of offerings in the Microsoft Office 365 suite is the Office Professional Plus package. This package consists of all the traditional Microsoft Office applications including, Word, Excel, PowerPoint, Access, and OneNote. Each of these applications functions almost identically to their desktop variants and carries the same user interface. Users will be familiar with the environment and require minimal training.

While the Office Professional Package allows you to create, modify and view documents, it relies on another component to store, organize, and manage the documents and content. This is the SharePoint Online component. At its core, SharePoint Online is a content management system that allows for collaboration, workflows, real-time updates, and access level management. In addition to the traditional content management functionality, SharePoint Online is also a web portal that allows organizations to create websites and communicate enterprise wide.

Functionality includes, but is not limited to wikis, blogs, and discussion forums. The Exchange Online and Lync Online components are all about communication. Exchange Online is an online, service-based email server that works very much like Microsoft Exchange Server. It includes email functionality, content management, and calendar management. Lync Online takes this one step further by adding video and web conferencing functionality, enterprise instant messaging and virtual meetings. All of these communication features of Office 365 are available online from virtually anywhere.

Being able to access everything from virtually anywhere is complimented by the ability to use almost any type of device to use Office 365. This includes cell phones, tablets, and even kiosks in malls and other public places. This functionality comes from the Web Apps component of Office 365. Web Apps makes editing, viewing, and sharing content a possibility no matter where you are and what devices you have available to you. It works with all Microsoft Office documents and even enables email and Lync communication functionality on mobile devices.

It's the next step in taking the desktop experience to your mobile device. All of these features come together to provide an online solution to meet the demands of today's organizations. By minimizing maintenance, reducing cost, and adding mobility and flexibility, Microsoft aims to offer a next generation solution that will reap all the benefits of the cloud. Benefits Office 365 has an array of endless benefits. The many benefits include cost, security, ease of use, and many other factors.

Some of the benefits that it offers are anytime, anywhere access, professional face for your business, ease of communication and collaboration inside and outside your organization, friendly user interface, straightforward to use e-mail, collaboration, and online meeting solutions, safety and security, seamless coordination with the tools you already know, no requirement for advanced It knowledge, 99. 9-percent availability, flexibility of your business and much more. One major benefit is that you can view your documents, e-mails, calendars, and contacts from on virtually any device you that you own.

You also don’t necessarily have to be in a central location. You can view all your documents or email anywhere in the world. Office 365 is a very basic easy to use infrastructure. Everything is user friendly and straight forward. Another feature is that you can edit your documents or edit your calendar from any device. It’s also very safe and secure. The anti-virus and ant-spam are updated frequently. With this technology you can rely on never losing a document again. It’s all stored in a cloud environment. With the cloud environment you can communicate with people all over the world.

With this environment it saves businesses a lot of money. Office 365 is based on a pay as you go option. The pricing is based per person on a monthly basis. It’s virtually very cheap to purchase. One key benefit is that it is very cost effective. This product is a pay-as-you-go service. Even though the prices are on a monthly base it’s still very affordable. Microsoft came up with three different plans. Businesses can choose their preference based on the necessity or features they want. Everyone from small businesses to educational institutions can utilize this product. Office 365 helps businesses save money and time.

Office 365 can be used on a vast array of devices from PCs to hand held devices. The first plan is designed for a small business which consists of up to 25 employees. This plan is paid monthly. This plan is six dollars per user/per month. This access includes mobile access. With mobile devices the only requirement is that it has a Wi-Fi connection. With this fee it includes many features such as e-mail, ease of access to view documents anywhere, use of SharePoint, and many other functions. With e-mail functionality you get up to 25MB of storage. E-mail archiving is also a great benefit.

Another feature is the ease of access of viewing documents online. Not only can documents be viewed online but documents can be easily edited online also. The second plan is for midsize businesses and enterprises. This plan can be purchased on a monthly plan or a yearly plan. The cost is ten dollars to twenty seven dollars per month. This cost is per user/per month. The key benefits with this plan is that you get 24/7 support, anti-virus is supported, ease of distributing documents through SharePoint, and the use of instant messaging for business meetings. Another major benefit is that you can have unlimited e-mail storage.

It also consists of “Enterprise voice”. This is a key advancement in order to lower the costs of communication. With this feature you don’t need the use of a telephone but you do need internet connection to use the many features. The last plan that is offered is the “Kiosk Worker Plan”. The price is four dollars to ten dollars per user/per month. This plan is geared towards people who work in retail or people who share PCs. This plan consists of a 500 MB e-mail storage size. Kiosk workers utilize Microsoft Exchange to view their e-mail or calendar. They also have the ease of editing documents on the web.

They only have basic editing rights. With the four dollar plan they can only view the documents and they can’t make any changes. Implementation Plan The way office 365 is going to be implemented into the business is simple, but it is very important that when you introduce a new product like Office 365 that we do so methodically, by doing so we avoid lot of errors and make it easy for the people that are going to be using this product. What we must first do is a detail introduction of the product to all the active stakeholders, this done by either calling for a meeting or sending information and introduction guides to the stakeholders.

After the introduction briefing it is now up to us to study the costumer infrastructure and do a run through of all the activities that we will do and the problems that might occur during this process. Upon this review we can now give the costumer timeline and guidance of the installation process. Upon completion, it is now time to give the company help or service desk training regarding common problem solving. After this we can now start doing the testing of the product on site and in the process giving training to those that are eventually going to be using Office 365.

Finally we do the actual migration of our data into the new cloud system. Office 365 will now allow user to access their e-mail, important documents, contacts, and calendar on nearly any device from almost anywhere. It frees you to work where and when you choose, allowing you to respond to important requests right away, no matter where you are. Because you can use your mobile device to access e-mail and documents, you won’t have to hurry back to the office or look for a Wi-Fi hot spot if you are using your computer.

When traveling, you can access your e-mail and even edit online documents from most popular web browsers and easy to use. Office 365 is easy to try, simple to learn, and straightforward to use. It works flawlessly with the programs you know and use most, including Outlook, Word, Excel, OneNote and PowerPoint. With Office 365, you can choose which tools to use. With Office 365, you can create a password-protected portal to share large, hard-to-email files both inside and outside your organization, giving you a single location to find the very latest versions of files or documents, no matter how many people are working on them.

Powerful security features from Microsoft help protect your data. Office 365 is backed with a 99. 9-percent uptime, financially backed guarantee. Office 365 helps safeguard your data with enterprise-grade reliability, disaster recovery capabilities, data centers in multiple locations, and a strict privacy policy. It also helps protect your email environment with up-to-date antivirus and anti-spam solutions. Course Integration Microsoft Office 365 has numerous benefits to offer its prospective customers, individual, small and medium business to enterprises and government agencies.

Throughout the course so far we have learned about IS topics ranging from new technologies, strategies, techniques, best practices and ethical and managerial challenges. Microsoft Office 365 is built primarily from the ground up to support cloud computing and provide access from anywhere at any time and using the vast majority of wireless devices that support Wi-Fi. Cloud Computing in Office 365 represents a competitive advantage that the company keeps advertizing about. Microsoft came up with a strategic planning and competitive pricing model tailored to its customers.

They have different pricing schemes that suit and appeal to everyone. Part of the company’s strategic planning is to capitalize on the “Five Industry Forces”, in which they are among the first to enter this market, they don’t fear threats of new competitors entering this market since it requires a great deal of investments, they have the bargaining power of suppliers since they provide something that not many companies can provide, they don’t fear any threat generated from any substitute in the market since there are not that many companies providing the same service, and they have a very well and respectful brand.

Some small size companies that do not afford the cost of sophisticated functional systems depend heavily on Office application to fill this gap and provide them with all functionalities that enable them to carry on with their day-to-day activities. Microsoft Office 365 provides the ultimate solution for collaboration and communication through several means either through Exchange server for big organizations or Outlook for small companies and also through Lync. Microsoft Office 365 promises 99. 9% availability and uptime through its innovative cloud computing.

The company uses Service Level Agreements with their customers to define the level and the quality of expected services and the estimated time to recover from an outage. As the number of malicious threats increase on the application level, Microsoft promises a much secured environment backed by industry standard anti-virus, anti-phishing and anti-spam that alleviates the effort of maintenance off the IT folks and let them concentrate on their core business. Throughout the course, we talked about the new approach of cost saving and cost reduction of applications through the use of Software as a Service (SaaS).

Office 365 is a great example for this approach, in which the company bundles different set of tools and applications and make them available on demand for a monthly fees. This model reinforces the “economies of scale” in application operations, in which an application provider may be able to provide better and cheap services. As much as Office 365 has plenty of good things to offer; it is also inevitable from the ethical and managerial challenges. Among these challenges are, hosting all these data in its data center presents a big challenge for the company.

One of the biggest questions is how Microsoft will handle security and privacy. In a release note from Microsoft detailing the security and privacy features of the application and in lieu of the Patriot act, Microsoft stated “In a limited number of circumstances, Microsoft may need to disclose data without your prior consent, including as needed to satisfy legal requirements, or to protect the rights or property of Microsoft or others (including the enforcement of agreements or policies governing the use of the service). ” Critical Assessment: Critique Technology (Compare and Contrast the technology)

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