You may have heard those two words quite often recently and you want to know exactly what they mean without to much marketing between the lines.
Office 365 is a set of productivity tools offered by Microsoft as a subscription. You pay per user, per month or per year and get the following for your organization:
- spam free e-mail with access from a web browser, Office Outlook, a smartphone like iPhone, Android, Windows Phone, BlackBerry, Symbian or any e-mail client. You also get personal and shared Contacts and Calendars – this is called Exchange Online
- documents stored in a central web location securely accessible from a PC, a MAC or a web browser (IE, Firefox and Safari officially suported, others work too). You can attach workflows to those documents so people interact with them in a predefined manner – you get this from SharePoint Online
- lists (for example an Asset Inventory, an Issues Tracking mini-app) – also from SharePoint Online
- intranet (you can publish internal know-how, documents, links, pictures or any kind of files) – from SharePoint Online
- public website – also from SharePoint online
- instant messaging and web conferencing – offered through Lync Online
If you want to take them for a spin, it takes 30 seconds to set up a trial.
More info from the vendor here.
