by Brett

Office 365 is a set of cloud services available on a subscription basis from Microsoft. You can buy the service directly from Microsoft or through a Microsoft Partner.

All the services include the core services; email, shared calendar, document management, team collaboration, mobile access, instant messaging, online meetings, and presence. This article is intended to give you a straightforward description of the basic services without the “marketing spin” you will see from Microsoft.

Office 365 provides basic as well as advanced capabilities. There are multiple plans providing a variety of capabilities. The small business plan (P1) is designed for professionals and small businesses from 1-25 users at $6 a seat. Microsoft jumps from small business to Enterprise with its “Enterprise” plans (E1-E4) ranging in price from $10 to $27 per person (they call this mid-sized to Enterprise). The P1 plan has great features but does not include support.

Overview

The services come with a 99.9% percent uptime guarantee. Microsoft will refund your service fee if it does not meet the standard.

The menu of Office 365 services includes:

• Exchange Online
• SharePoint Online
• Lync Online
• Office Professional Pro Plus (included in E3 and E4 plans)

You can buy these services bundled in the plans, or as stand-alone services. In addition, there are specialized plans for kiosk users, educational, and government organizations.

Exchange Online

Exchange Online provides basic and advanced email and calendar capabilities. You can access your 25GB mailbox using Outlook 2007, Outlook 2010, or using a basic POP or IMAP client. Mac clients can use Outlook 2011. If using a POP client you do not get features like calendars and integration and many other functions that Microsoft has built in when you use Outlook.

Exchange Online also includes use of Outlook Web Access (often called OWA for short. This can be a bit confusing since OWA also refers to Office Web Apps which I’ll talk about in a minute). OWA is a full-featured web interface that allows you to send/receive/manage your mail from a web browser. You can also instant message and see presence provided by Lync Online in OWA. The service includes mobile email access with Exchange Online for the most popular phones including Windows 7, iPhone and Android.

Blackberry users should take note that Microsoft has a new agreement with RIM regarding services for Exchange Online that will impact you. Stay tuned to https://community.office365.com for the latest news on this (if this information is hard to find or fuzzy, that means it’s not yet finalized).

When you administer Exchange Online, unlike Exchange Online administration in BPOS, you are actually managing your “tenant” settings on the server.

This means you have many of the same capabilities available as if you had your own Exchange server. Advanced users will like the server side rules, role based access control, mobile policies, mail tips, delegation features, personal archive, and remote PowerShell options. Note that you also get access to ForeFront Online Protection for Exchange (FOPE), a frequently requested feature from larger companies that is not in the P1 plan.

For those needing basic services – Exchange Online will “just work”. For basic users, the most complicated aspect of setting up Exchange Online is the domain delegation for custom domains.

See the Exchange Online Service Description for complete details.

SharePoint Online

Now this may be obvious from the name, but SharePoint is about sharing. Explaining SharePoint Online is bit more complicated. SharePoint is like one of those multi-function knives that has screwdriver, corkscrew, 10 different blades, and toothpick. How do you really describe it?

SharePoint is perfectly suited for a team or company that has multiple people working on a document or set of documents. Not only will SharePoint host the documents and manage who has control, but it also provides a central location for team members to communicate about the process. That’s why it’s often referred to as providing “document and collaboration” services, a term I have always found a bit vague.

SharePoint’s key technology provides prebuilt—but configurable—private websites that you can interact with. In effect, you can create “Team” websites with a click of button that have places for documents, task lists, notes, announcements, blogs, wikis and more.

You can customize the look and feel, add and remove features, add pictures, and essentially change things around without any programming whatsoever. This screen shows a page from my SharePoint Online site in “edit” mode. In this mode, you can easily select pre-built “web parts” as they are called (shown as Document library, Calendar, Accruements, and Contacts), to insert anywhere on the page that makes sense to you.

One of the most popular and easy to use features of SharePoint is the ability to “check in” and “check out” documents. Every time you add a document, SharePoint will automatically update its version number. SharePoint can automatically keep a history of each check in allowing you to revert to any previous version.

These features work directly in Microsoft Office as well. Microsoft Office knows when you are working with a document stored on SharePoint Online. You can check in, revert to a previous version, and see who is online editing the document without leaving Word. Shown below is Word allowing me to check out this document (the one you are reading) from my SharePoint Online site.

Accessing SharePoint sites for your organization requires authentication as they deal with private company business. However, SharePoint does include the ability to create a simple public website and host it on the internet. Microsoft is careful to say these sites provide “basic” functionality. These websites are not intended to provide more than a simple presence that provides information about your company. Do not plan on moving your current company website to SharePoint Online without careful analysis.

Note that if you have a site with Windows Live Small Business, that site will not be automatically moved to Office 365. They are different systems, and you need to evaluate the ShareOnline public website capabilities to see if desired features are present.

What Microsoft calls “document sharing” is another way to share content. This allows you to invite up to 50 users outside of your organization to share a document library. To do this, users need a Windows Live ID associated with a Hotmail account. Microsoft is working on easing this requirement, but currently Live ID and Hotmail are required. If you want more than 50 individuals accessing the site, you can add more for a fee.

Finally, SharePoint Online is the service that provides Office Web Apps—the browser based version of Word, Excel, PowerPoint and OneNote. As shown below, OWA allows a user to view an Office document online, without the need to have Office installed. Editing rights do not come with each subscription. To edit the documents using Office Web Apps, you must subscribe to plan P1, E3, or E4. In addition, take note that printing may not work as you expect. When you click File, and then Print, the document is rendered as a PDF. You can then print from the PDF.

There is a great deal more to say about SharePoint Online. You can post Excel spreadsheets as lists, publish and share Access databases, create PowerPoint slide libraries, build custom lists that interact with other SharePoint content and email you automatically when people make changes, create workflows and assign documents or other SharePoint objects, use SharePoint Designer 2010 to customize sites, synchronize files for offline use with SharePoint Workspace 2010 and more.

One key issue: Microsoft does not create a migration tool to move existing SharePoint content to SharePoint Online. You are more or less on your own regarding this. There are some good 3rd party resources around, but you will have to do your homework.

See the SharePoint Online Service Description for a complete list of capabilities.

Lync Online

Lync Online is Office 365’s third main service. Lync Online provides instant messaging and “presence” between Office 365 users. Presence is a feature you’ve seen with instant messaging systems where you can tell if people are online or not. Lync Online presence shows up in some useful places like Outlook, SharePoint Online, Outlook Web App, and other presence aware applications. Often, when you are about to send an email and you see the person is online, you can just IM them on the spot and save time. In addition, your availability is linked to your calendar. If you have a meeting set for 10am, Lync Online will show your status as “in a meeting”. If you’re using Lync Online to make a call, you’re status shows as “on a call”. Of course you can easily change your status manually to show you are available—or set to Do Not Disturb which prevents others from contacting you.

Lync Online comes with the Lync 2010 client that you install on each desktop. Lync 2010, while probably the least known of the Office 365 services, has many time saving features. You can transfer a file, make voice over IP phone calls where allowed (not all countries allow it), share your desktop with others, and use video (where supported).

Lync Online also works with users of Windows Messenger for instant messaging. At this time, you cannot use Lync Online with Yahoo or Google Talk. There isn’t a Lync client for the Mac at this time. In addition, the Office Communicator provided with Office 2011 isn’t supported with Lync Online. Microsoft is working on an updated related to Macs and Lync Online. I have no information about when they may be available.

Lync provides some features that save a lot of time, but you won’t read about in the marketing literature as major benefits. For example, you can add a picture to your Office 365 profile page (or import from Active Directory for those using Directory Synchronization services with Office 365) so others can see who they are talking to. In addition, you can see a picture of the person you are searching for. One feature I have used a lot allows me to tag a contact in Lync 2010 so that when he or she comes online I am notified. This can be a real lifesaver when you urgently need to talk to someone the moment they get online.

Another favorite of mine is to use the Lync 2010 client to communicate real time details to your team. For example, let’s say your cell phone is lost or down. You can post a new contact number using Lync 2010 (“Cell phone down call 425-555-1212”) and anyone trying to find you can get your updated info.

If you think Office 365 is good value already, wait till you see this!

Lync Online also supports online conference hosting for up to 250 users with voice and video. It replaces Microsoft Office Live Meeting. Meeting invitations can be sent directly from within Outlook using the Lync Meeting button (shown below) that installs when you install the Lync 2010 client.

Users join the meeting using (in order of best experience) Lync 2010, the Lync Attendee Client, or the Lync Web Client. The Lync Attendee client provides a great experience, including voice over IP. If people use the Lync Web Client, they cannot hear voice over IP but can see the presentation. A conference bridge would be needed in this case. Mac users, unfortunately, cannot use these tools as of yet.

Shown in the picture above is the Lync Online “stage” for online meetings with a PowerPoint deck loaded plus video. You can write on the deck in real time, type, take polls, share your desktop or other application for demonstrations, and switch to a whiteboard which others can write on too.

Finally, you can record these presentations for later playback. This is little app packs a lot of power into a small UI. Hopefully you can take advantage of some of this goodness.

Lync Online can integrate with a Lync server deployed on premise to provide an integrated voice messaging environment complex with PBX integration. The E4 version of Office 365 includes rights to deploy Lync Server 2010.

See the Lync Online service description for complete details.

Office Professional Pro Plus

The final service offered by Office 365 is Office Professional Plus. This is not really an online service in the same sense as the other services. When you subscribe to Pro Plus, you are buying the rights to download, install and use Microsoft Office Professional Plus. The online service aspect comes from the subscription service, background licensing and activation that occur automatically over the internet.

Office Pro Plus allows businesses to reduce upfront costs for keeping current with Microsoft Office. A lot of businesses are still using Office 2003, which is not supported with Office 365. The reason Office 2003 isn’t supported is not to force businesses to buy a new copy of Office every decade, but rather because the technology has simply moved past what existed when Office 2003 was created. Carrying legacy software forward is costly and limits what can be supported in new services.

Keep in mind that if you do download and install Office Professional Plus as part of a trial subscription and then decided to unsubscribe, you will need to uninstall and reinstall a different version of Office. You cannot just keep using Office Professional Plus as it will “time out”.

See the Office Professional Plus service description for details.

Advanced Office 365 Capabilities

Office 365 comes with the ability to migrate mail from on-premise Exchange servers under several scenarios from simple to staged migrations. In addition, you synchronize Active Directory with Office 365 using a free directory synchronization tool. Office 365 supports hybrid environments where you have some users on premise and some users online all using the same domain name. Office 365 also has a “rich-coexistence” scenario where the on-premise Exchange servers are configured to work with Exchange Online so that “free-busy” information, archives, MailTips, message tracing, and other features work between the cloud and on-premise settings.

Finally, you can “federate” identity through the addition of Active Directory Federated Services. These are advanced scenarios that require careful planning but, when completed, provide a really great working environment with true single-sign on capabilities and the option to federate with other users of Office 365 or users of AD FS.

For deployment details see the Office 365 Deployment help and the Plan for Deploying AD-FS whitepaper.

Summary

As you can see, each of the basic services provides multiple functions including basic and advanced functionality. Consequently, any brief description of the services does not fully capture the full scope of these capabilities. Explaining the breadth and depth of the Office 365 services is a challenge but, taken as whole, this is an impressive offering that is attractively priced.