We get asked, a lot, why an an oganization should pick Office 365 over other email services such as Gmail (as an example).\u00a0 After all, email is email, is it not??<\/p>\n
This is one of those \u201cloaded\u201d questions, specially if you’re older and remember the email server \u201cwars\u201d back in the early 2000’s.\u00a0 But I digress \u2026<\/p>\n
Firstly, \u00a0the email \u201cserver\u201d in O365 is Exchange and Exchange handles something like 90% of the world’s email.\u00a0 It is \u201cthe\u201d corporate email server standard and it is so for good reason.<\/p>\n
Secondly,\u00a0 Outlook.\u00a0 Outlook and Exchange go together hand in hand, each making the other \u201cshine\u201d.\u00a0 If you use Outlook you miss a monster chunk of the functionality of the product if it is NOT talking to Exchange.\u00a0 And this really bring us to the third point.<\/p>\n
Thirdly, Outlook (and Exchange) are so much more <\/em>than email!\u00a0 And, frankly, this is where all of the really shiny bits show up.\u00a0 Outlook (and Exchange) aggregate ALL of the functions you see inside Outlook (email, calendar, contacts, tasks) in one place.\u00a0 Exchange (the server) drives all of this and provides the backing store for Outlook.\u00a0 While Outlook can certainly talk to other email servers including Gmail, the bits of Outlook that aren’t email suffer for it.\u00a0 This, in turn, tends to upset users when calendaring and other information sharing is not smooth and seamless.\u00a0 Of course, there are other services out there that purport to \u201ctalk\u201d to Outlooks’s calendaring and contacts and other modules but none do it as effectively or as seamlessly as does Exchange.\u00a0 And, of course, there’s the whole issue of having all of this info syncronize cleanly across your multiple devices (computers, phones, tablets).\u00a0 O365 drives this very cleanly, again because it is Exchange in the back end handling all of the heavy lifting.<\/p>\n OK, so Outlook and Exchange are the \u201cperfect pair\u201d.\u00a0 That’s all fine and dandy, but Exchange is only one piece of Office 365.\u00a0 For your subscription dollars you get a whole bunch more than \u201cjust email\u201d and that is the final justification for why we strongly<\/em> suggest Office 365 to our customers.\u00a0 There are a lot of email services available where you get email<\/span> for $9 or $10 per month.\u00a0 For the same dollars you get email, SharePoint, Lync, Delve, OneDrive for Business, Yammer (depending on subscription).\u00a0 You might also get downloadable Office software rights (depending on subscription).\u00a0 That’s a lot of value for the dollar!\u00a0 For us, to be frank, it really is a no brainer, Office 365 wins hands down!<\/p>\n Oh, did I also mention that by storing your Office files in O365 (SharePoint, OneDrive for Business) that the “online” versions of Word, Excel, PowerPoint and Visio can display your Office files for reading and editing on devices that DON’T have Office loaded on them?\u00a0 This is one of those features that you don’t think much about until you use it and then you wonder how you lived with out it. And, yes, I know I bang on about this incessantly but it seems the message needs to be repeated, incessantly, for people to hear it.<\/p>\n Office 365\u00a0 \u2026 just \u201cdo it\u201d!<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"