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What is Office 365? How to Use it?

Office 365 is the product package in which Microsoft software is offered over the internet. At the same time, the concept of Office365 is used for the site and environment that broadcasts under this name.

You can reach Office 365 at the address below. You can start using the 30-day free trial as a member: www.office365.com

What does Office 365 include?

Don’t think of Office 365 as a completely made-from-scratch environment. It would be more accurate to think of it as a specialized version of several Microsoft products. Products included in the package:

  • Exchange Online: Provides e-mail communication, calendar, contact directory
  • Sharepoint Online: Provides document sharing, corporate information, collaborative workspaces
  • Lync Online: Provides instant messaging service
  • Office Web Apps: The online version of Word, Excel, PowerPoint and OneNote
  • Office Professional Plus: Unlike other Office suites; Professional Plus has some parts that integrate with Office365.

Office 365 is a cloud service. It is hosted in Microsoft’s data center. This means; is that you will not be dealing with infrastructure works.

Microsoft offers a 99.9% uptime guarantee for Office365. You can sign an SLA agreement for this.

There are many concepts that classify cloud services: SaaS, IaaS, PaaS, PIaaS, DaaS etc. Which of these is Office 365? It is a SaaS (Software as a Service) service.

You can work with Office 365 on Word, Excel, PowerPoint files produced by Office 2003, 2007 and 2010 applications. It is also compatible with Entourage 2004 and higher for MAC.

I suggest you check out the video below before continuing. Sometimes a one-minute video can replace dozens of sentences. If you don’t want to watch the video, you won’t have anything to lose. Because it’s a general promotional video.

Microsoft no longer has a product called BPOS (Business Productivity Online Services). BPOS customers can upgrade to Office 365 for free.

Management panel

When you become a member and start the 30-day trial period, you will be greeted with a screen like the one below. If we do not count the large amount of orange color, we can say that it has a user-friendly interface.

All services will be active as soon as you create your account. Let’s take a short tour of the services.

Email Account

The address of the account given to you will be yourname@yourname.onmicrosoft.com. You can create your own domains using the “Domains” link in the main menu.

You will immediately recognize the OWA interface of Exchange 2010.

You can create e-mail accounts and groups within the given limits according to the package you will buy (I will talk about the packages shortly).

Corporate Portal

You can use the “TeamSite” structure in Office 365 to meet your document sharing and collaboration needs. You have the opportunity to customize everything from the colors to the modules of the corporate site you will create. Below is an image from the administration panel of the corporate site.

General Site

You can also design your institution’s public page with Office 365. It has WYSIWYG (What You See Is What You Get) logic. In other words, you are editing with purely visual tools. No code. You can create your site by choosing among dozens of themes.

What is Office 365 MarketPlace?

Let’s say you have decided to use Office 365 but you need support. Help documents can be useful to a certain extent. However, if you are a large enterprise and want to migrate your complex environment to Office365, you may need professional support. Companies that provide professional support are located in Office 365 MarketPlace. Kind of like a company catalog. Address:

Licensing and Pricing

To be able to use Office 365, Microsoft offers you three different packages:

  • For professionals and small businesses: Covers businesses with up to 25 users. Fees start at $6. For medium and large businesses: Includes businesses with over 25 users. Fees start at $10.
  • For educational institutions: Actually, it should not be considered as a separate package. It covers a plan for medium and large businesses.

Conclusion

Considering that there are 1 billion computers in the world where Microsoft Office is installed and cloud services are becoming increasingly popular, we can say that we will hear the name of Office 365 more.

Ned Sahin

Blogger for 20 years. Former Microsoft Engineer. Author of six books. I love creating helpful content and sharing with the world. Reach me out for any questions or feedback.

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