With the Internet of Things (IoT) fuelled by Cloud, everything is an application. Anything running on the cloud is delivered as a service. Microsoft leveraged its office applications and productivity tools at the right time. Deployed it on cloud and called it: Microsoft office 365. Microsoft office 365 refers to services such as MS-office and set of productivity tools including SharePoint enabled over the Internet.
SharePoint Intranet on Office 365 Platform: allows creating digital workplaces anywhere and delivering in real-time. Office 365 allows employees to collaborate, deliver information and services. Intranets on Office 365 help employees to store, share, and co-author information. Office 365 seamlessly facilitates dynamic work environments. By integrating intranet with office 365, organizations can efficiently support business processes and empower employees. Office365 offers end-to-end content management and document collaboration through SharePoint. SharePoint is also well utilized to build dynamic websites and interactive portals.
Microsoft is also strongly promoting a cloud-based approach. Companies opting for SharePoint 2013 through the Office 365 offering will benefit from more frequent updates and better integration with Yammer.
Microsoft Office 365 Increasing Foothold
Office 365 provides a number of additional features and various subscription options. Independent Software Vendors (ISVs) and SMBs can start adopting it at a fraction of cost. Office 365 hosted in the cloud offers huge savings over deployment and maintenance costs.
Microsoft introduced subscription models that are going to make their foothold even stronger. They are likely to make Office 365 a feasible alternative in the small-to-medium-sized space (SMB), which has traditionally belonged to Google.
Office 365 for SharePoint: Master of Collaboration and Much More
Seamless communication and continuous flow of information are redefining the way organizations work. Customers integrate SharePoint 2013 with Office 365, resulting in hybrid cloud solutions. Users with the right access controls can access both on-premise SharePoint and cloud-based office 365.
Gartner’s research believes SharePoint Online and Office 365 will continue to grow share faster in small and midsize businesses within markets such as North America. Its improving capabilities for worker collaboration and its reliability for security is also making it an ideal platform for advanced enterprise-level meeting software.
SharePoint and Office 365 have been prime products of collaboration for most of the fortune 500 organizations. SharePoint 2013 supports BYOD and mobility boosting productivity. When collaboration is required, SharePoint portals with office365 seamlessly make it happen. Edit documents on the move, share documents across all the team members. The version control feature in SharePoint helps to keep a track of changes and additions made.
Co-Authoring using office365 for SharePoint
Consider a team working on a business presentation. Team members work in different time zones. Each team member has a role in creating the presentation. By utilizing office365 for SharePoint, team members can simultaneously edit the same document. Each addition made to the presentation can be tracked and identified. Once the addition is made and saved, it is reflected by means of notification to other members.
This kind of close integration, instant updates, and effortless collaboration is offered by Microsoft office 365 for SharePoint Intranet Portal.
Office 365 is perfect for startups. We don’t have to think about internal infrastructure or IT maintenance. Employees have embraced team spaces within SharePoint Online, in addition to using the application to share large files. With the added mobility of SharePoint, employees can access files from their smartphones and share with others even while they’re on the go.”- Christoph Keisers, Managing Director, Agheera
SharePoint is currently utilized in the following ways by most of the Fortune 500 organizations.
- Enterprise Content Management with Office 365
- Office Networking Example: Employee home page to keep a track of organization news, happenings, events, and recruitments.
- Intranet and Extranet Portals
- Collaboration tools
- Project Management tools. Example: Project Dashboards
- Data Analytics and Business Intelligence
- Enterprise search in Portals
- Business process Automation
IT Cube: ITConnect Intranet Portal
ITCube is a SharePoint development company that has decades’ worth of experience in deploying SharePoint based enterprise solutions. ITCube’s ITConnect is an off-the-shelf Intranet Portal that is tailor-made for small to mid-size organizations. Built on top of the SharePoint foundation, it offers plenty of useful features that help organizations to get started with the Intranet portal. To know more, check ITConnect
Benefits of Office 365 for SharePoint
SharePoint Online offers end-to-end collaboration with Office 365. SharePoint services are highly scalable in terms of adding additional users/ more storage. SharePoint online is closely integrated with Microsoft Office 365 applications.
We use Office 365 for sharing best practices and interacting with medical professionals without extra travel so we can reach our goal of … increasing the number of children we help every year.”-Ruben Ayala, Operation Smile, Senior Vice President of Medical Affairs
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Extensive BYOD and Mobile devices support: Flexible and Versatile
Access emails, those important documents, download presentations on the move. Look-up contacts and schedule instant meetings from mobile devices. Use desktop office applications as web applications via office 365 in mobile devices. Create, edit, and share documents. With SharePoint Intranet Portal upload all the documents into a centralized document repository.
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Security: Resilient and Robust
Office 365 applications are accessed via 128-bit SSL/TSL encryption. Highly resilient security measures are followed based on Microsoft Trustworthy Computing Initiative. Security Development Lifecycle (SDL) is implemented for all Office 365 online services development, deployment, and maintenance. To know more, visit Office 365 online application security.
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Great Support and Periodic Updates
Since January of 2013, Microsoft has released over 100 new feature-level updates in Office 365. “Many of those are cloud-first and they get rolled into service packs later,” said a Microsoft spokesperson
The Microsoft office 365 online services are comprehensively managed by Microsoft. With periodic updates and patches installed in background without customers knowing about it. With SLAs and 99.9% assured uptime of the office365 services, there will either little/nil services interruption.
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Single Sign-On
With Active Directory Federation Services (ADFS), organizations can implement single sign-on. Customers can easily log on to their domain and get automatically authenticated to Office 365 services.
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Exchange Online: Cost-effective storage services
Avail the benefits of exchange server 2010 using exchange online services. User mailboxes and personal archives are available. Its storage capacity can be configured per-user basis. Users can also restore deleted items by enabling the Single Item recovery option. Users either connect to exchange online via Outlook client or outlook web application.
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Lync Online: Enterprise Communication
Lync Online is the service component of Office 365. Mainly used for Instant Messaging, conferencing, screen sharing; file transfer, and whiteboard within an organization network. Lync is also closely integrated with outlook. Public Switched Telephone Network (PSTN) is supported. Users can communicate using Lync over Outlook.
IT Cube, Microsoft Certified Gold Partner, is a specialist in implementing and deploying Office 365 and SharePoint solutions. IT Cube helps ISVs and SMBs to realize the true capabilities of Office365. Helps to leverage enterprise-level tools built on the SharePoint enterprise platform to further boost productivity.
Sources used
Digitalworkplace, CMSWire, Gartner, and WSJ