Office 365 For Dummies, 2nd Edition

Chapter 2Moving to the Office 365 Cloud

IN THIS CHAPTER

Exploring some of the key benefits and features of Office 365

Working with cloud-enabled Word, Excel, PowerPoint and Outlook

Developing your understanding of cloud based Exchange and SharePoint

Finding out how to use Skype for Business to instantly communicate with text, voice, and video

As we mention in Chapter 1, cloud computing is simply using a software application over the Internet. Microsoft Office 365 is a grouping of Microsoft products that are hosted and managed by Microsoft. You subscribe to the service on a monthly basis. This model of using software is often called Software as a Service (SaaS).

With the Office 365 offering, Microsoft takes care of all the installation and management of the complicated server products, such as SharePoint, Exchange, and Skype for Business. Your organization simply signs up, starts paying the monthly fee, and uses the software over the Internet (meaning in the cloud). The burden of the installation, patches, upgrades, backups, and maintenance (among other stuff) is all taken care of by smart Microsoft employees. To make you feel more comfortable, Microsoft has a 99.9 percent uptime guarantee that is backed by a legal contract called a Service Level Agreement (SLA).

In this chapter, you get a high-level view of the software products that Microsoft includes in the grouping of software products known as Office 365 and which are delivered over the Internet. These products include SharePoint, ...