- 16/11/2020
- Chetan Patadia
- 0
History
After a beta test that began in October 2010, Microsoft launched Office 365 on June 28, 2011, originally aimed at corporate users, as a successor to Microsoft Business Productivity Online Suite (BPOS).
With the release of Microsoft Office 2013, Microsoft expanded Office 365 to include new plans aimed at different types of businesses, along with new plans aimed at general consumers, including benefits tailored towards Microsoft consumer services such as OneDrive (whose integration with Office was a major feature of the 2013 suite)
What is Microsoft 365?
Microsoft 365 is a Microsoft’s subscription service, provides productivity applications necessary to get work done in the modern enterprise.
The suite of productivity applications is constantly being updated and improved by Microsoft.
It is the productivity cloud across work and life that brings together best-in-class apps to transform the way you work.
Designed to help you achieve more with innovative apps, intelligent cloud services, and world-class security.
View Video | Take a guided tour | See plans and pricing
Microsoft 365 Apps’ Overview
Access
In its simplest form it is a database management system. The application can store data in its own format or can import and link directly to data stored in other applications. It supports a variety of standard field types and forms to display and enter data.
Bookings
Microsoft Bookings is an online customer scheduling tool. If you operate an appointment-based business or service such as a lawyer’s office or a personal trainer, Bookings is a simple tool to provide you and your staff insight to daily appointments. It features customizable email and text reminders for both your staff and customers, ability to embed your Bookings page to your website or social media pages to enable your customers to schedule appointments. Other features include appointment rescheduling, cancellations, real-time staff availability, and Outlook.com and Google calendar integrations.
Calendar
Microsoft Calendar is a popular business application to schedule meetings and tasks. Integrated into Outlook email client application, Calendar is packed with features to help you stay on top of your day’s schedule. Features include audible and on-screen reminders, ability to check your colleagues’ availability when you schedule a meeting (Scheduling Assistant), ability to track who accepted or declined your meeting invitation, ability to view your calendar in multiple layout (e.g., list, calendar grid), and ability to easily create recurring events. Microsoft Calendar is an invaluable tool for the busy professional.
Delve
Is like a search machine for Office 365. The users can search and manage their emails, meetings, contacts, social networks, and documents stored in OneDrive. Artificial Intelligence helps filtering the most relevant people and content.
Dynamics
Microsoft Dynamics 365 is a collection of intelligent business software platform primary for CRM (customer relationship management) and ERP (enterprise resource planning). Within CRM and ERP, there are many applications designed to meet specific business and industry needs. This enables you to start with what you need now and expand into using other applications when you need them. There is a wide variety of business areas in which Dynamics 365 can be employed. These include financial planning, human resource management, customer insight, product insight, and much more. Dynamics 365 isn’t a single purpose application, but a suite of tools to help you unify your data, gain better insight to your business, and to make smarter decision.
Exchange
Each Microsoft 365 for Business subscription includes an Exchange Server, which handles all the email management duties. By default, each user is granted 50 GB of storage for email. Maintenance of the Exchange Server is generally handled at the administrator level.
Excel
Microsoft Excel is a spreadsheet for Windows, macOS, Android and iOS. It features calculation, graphing tools, pivot tables, and a macro programming language called Visual Basic for Applications.
Form
Is a tool that allows users to quickly create quizzes, surveys, questionnaires, and registrations. Data can easily be transferred to excel or built-in data analytics such as Power BI to visualize it and use for further actions.
Flow
Microsoft Flow allows you to automate workflows across applications. You can use Flow to connect email and IM alerts, synchronize files between applications, copy files from one service to another, collect data from one app and store it in another, and more. Templates are available to get you started.
Kaizala
Mobile communications is vital to many organizations, and Kaizala adds a secure mobile messaging and workflow app that can be deployed both internally and externally. Employees, customers, and vendors can all communicate and coordinate with each other in a secure environment.
My Analytics
Shows how people spend their time and who they spend it with the most. MyAnalytics is a private dashboard that analyses work habits. It can, for example, document meeting hours, email hours, focus hours and after hours. Based on the data, MyAnalytics helps to increase productivity, set goals, and monitor progress for higher impact. The dashboard is private and cannot be accessed by anyone else within the company. It tracks, monitors, and analyses personal growth and makes recommendations for healthier work habits.
OneNote
Is an application to gather handwritten or computer typed notes, drawings and audio commentaries. The note taking program makes it possible to easily share the notes with other OneNotes users. It is also perfect for note taking on-the-go.
Outlook
Includes an email client, calendar, address/contact book and task manager. The personal information manager is mainly used for emailing and can be used in integration with a Microsoft SharePoint server to share documents, calendars and information within an organization.
OneDrive
Is a file hosting service and allows to store files as well as personal data in a cloud. The files can be synchronized to the computer, downloaded, or shared with other people.
People
If you ever used the contact list feature of Microsoft Outlook, you are using People. Microsoft People is where information of your personal and business contacts are stored. There are a variety of information you can keep track off with People. Use it to save your contact’s phone numbers, office address, email addresses, job title, birthday, and even general notes about the person you want to reminder yourself on. In addition, collaboration features are built in to enable to send an email or start a chat session with a contact easily or to see recent emails you received from the person. Microsoft People is an indispensable tool to help you organize your contacts in a clean and easy-to-use interface.
Planner
Microsoft Planner is a task management application for you and your teams. Each team member can create, share, and work on tasks together. You’ll be able to track who’s responsible for the task, when it’s due, and post updates. View your tasks in ‘buckets’, in a calendar grid, or through graphs and charts to track and measure progress. This web-based application is an essential tool to help you supervise and manage projects. Microsoft Planner is a powerful tool to engage with your team and to ensure everyone has full visibility to the tasks and what is expected of them.
Power BI
Is a cloud-based suite of business analytics. It enables users to connect, visualize and analyse data with higher speed, efficiency and understanding. A broad range of live data is connected through easy-to-use dashboards. Users can provide and access interactive reports and compelling visualizations of the data. Data can be turned into insights and actions.
Publisher
Is a similar app to Microsoft Word. Unlike Word, it focuses more on the page layout and design rather than the text composition. The desktop publishing application is useful for small businesses with the need to create marketing materials.
PowerPoint
Microsoft PowerPoint is a powerful presentation software. The program uses slides to convey information rich in multimedia. The term “slide” refers to the slide projector, which this software effectively replaces. Create presentations that include images, videos, transitions, and animations. Get to your presentations from your computer, tablet, or phone. Share and work with others, wherever they are.
PowerApps
Microsoft PowerApps is an enterprise service that helps you quickly build, integrate, and share apps that work on any device. PowerApps lets you use built-in connections or those built by your company to connect your app to cloud and on-premises services, including Office 365, Dynamics CRM, OneDrive, SharePoint, SQL Server, Oracle databases, and more. You can easily share your PowerApps with co-workers by simply typing an email address.
Project
Microsoft Project is a project management software program, developed and sold by Microsoft, that is designed to assist a project manager in developing a plan, assigning resources to tasks, tracking progress, managing the budget, and analysing workloads.
Sway
Is a presentation program. Content can be pulled locally or from an Internet source directly. Another integration service of Sway presentation includes YouTube or Facebook content.
SharePoint
Is a platform for in which teams can collaborate, access, manage, and share data from any location. The web-based collaborative platform is a highly efficient content management system.
- Power Automate on SharePoint creates an automated process for tasks such as document approval. This feature gives you time to focus on more integral things throughout the day.
- SharePoint Site is a useful tool. You can use it for any business need for quick building business app, process automation, document management, content management, collaboration, intranet, extranet…etc. It comes with many ready to use components which are required for the business apps.
Skype
Like Microsoft Teams, Skype is a communication and collaboration tool. Use it to chat with or make audio calls to colleagues, set up group call and share your screen when hosting a presentation to a group of participants, or even make and receive video calls. In July 2019, Microsoft announced it will retire Skype of Business on July 31, 2021 (Skype for consumers will continue to be available). If your organization has not already, start migrating to Teams to ensure everyone has sufficient time to explore, learn, and become proficient with Teams. Read more on Microsoft Teams.
Staff Hub
Microsoft StaffHub is a cloud-based application that lets workers, and their managers use their mobile devices to manage schedules and keep in touch. Employees can use StaffHub to request time off, trade shifts, and communicate with other employees. Employees can also send messages directly to each other or to the entire team. Managers can use StaffHub to send messages, create schedules, and send team news or company announcements.
Stream
Microsoft Stream is an enterprise video service that people in your organization can use to upload, view, and share videos securely. You can share recordings of classes, meetings, presentations, training sessions, or other videos that aid your team’s collaboration. Microsoft Stream also makes it easy to share comments on a video and tag time codes in comments and descriptions to refer to specific points in a video.
Teams
Features workplace chats, meetings, notes and attachments for teams. It can also integrate extensions of non-Microsoft products. The Microsoft Team workspace is designed to bring people and content together and assists with tools needed for the team to collaborate.
ToDo
To-Do’s intelligent Suggestions make it easy to prioritize your daily tasks. Suggestions look at your to-dos across your lists and, based on a smart algorithm, recommend the most important ones for you each day. Plan your day – add to-dos from our Suggestions or enter new to-dos in My Day. Set due dates and reminder times for each to-do to keep everything on track. Add notes within each to-do’s detail view. Automatically sync your to-dos to Outlook tasks. Access your lists and to-dos from anywhere. With our iPhone®, Android™, and Windows 10 web apps, you can log in to your account on all your devices.
Word
MS Word is a popular word-processing program used primarily for creating documents such as letters, brochures, learning activities, tests, quizzes, and students’ homework assignments.
Whiteboard
Microsoft Whiteboard is an application that allows you to free form ideas on a digital canvas. With built-in collaboration features, you and your team can work together, whether in the same room or from multiple remote locations. Sketch ideas using your mouse or with a stylus if you have a touch-screen device. Being a cloud-based application, you’ll have access to your boards from multiple devices, share them, or include them in websites.
Yammer
Is an enterprise social networking service and another major collaboration tool within Office 365. Employees who have access to it can join a private chat within the organization. The service enables users to safely collaborate, share pictures and documents and create groups related to work and interests.
How Microsoft 365 addresses the challenges?
- Challenge – Poor collaboration between an individual, internal team, cross functional teams, remote employees, external teams, and clients.
Solution – Unify collaboration across the locations, devices, teams.
- Challenge – Inefficient communication with many ineffective communication tools.
Solution – Unify communication across the organization by empowering real time chat, call with on hand file sharing and more.
- Challenge – Information chaos. Biggest issue in the organization. Data is stored across multiple storage spaces.
Solution – Centralize and unify enterprise content management system with improved information architecture.
- Challenge – Manual or partially digitalized business processes and decision making.
Solution – Automate business processes and boost decision making through workflow.
- Challenge – Poor employee productivity, performance, and satisfaction.
Solution – Catalogue of tools to increase the productivity, efficiency, and happiness.
- Challenge – High Capital and Operational expenses on multiple apps, devices, and its integration, stationary, prints…etc.
Solution – Let MS 365 be a single technology landscape to satisfy your various business needs.
Solutions you can expect on Microsoft 365
Align the critical dimension of any business: People – Process – Technology. Unlimited possibilities to use Microsoft 365 for an Individual, Teams, Businesses. Few examples are as below:
- Intranet for Teams, Projects, Organization, SBU.
- Extranet for Vendors, Customers, Partners.
- Document Management for teams like HR, Projects, Sales, Marketing, Operations, R & D, Legal, Account
- Enterprise Content Management
- Process Automation
- Borderless unified Collaboration & Communication
- Productivity boosting for an Individual, Team & Organization
How to get Microsoft 365?
There are different plans available with different Apps & services. Major categories are as below, under which various plans are there.
Business | Enterprise | Home | Education | Non-profit | Government
It’s easy to switch between plans. All plans are subscription-based plan.