Microsoft Launches Office 365

Steve Ballmer Announces Office 365 on June 28, 2011Microsoft Office 365 launched on June 28th, 2011. In a press announcement, Steve Ballmer discussed how technology connects people to the things they care about and how businesses seek technologies that focus on ways to make the most out of collaboration and combine experience and expertise.

Office 365 combines the familiar Microsoft Office desktop suite with cloud-based versions of the latest collaboration and communication tools from Microsoft—all delivered as a subscription service. Which means you can make your employees more productive, while managing costs.

Office 365 Benefits:

  • Stay connected with instant messaging
  • Real-time virtual meetings with coworkers and customers
  • Work together simultaneously on files and documents
  • Share calendars with coworkers
  • Design and maintain compelling websites easily

Because it’s from Microsoft, the service is backed with the industry’s most rigorous financially backed, 99.9 percent uptime service level agreement. And its flexible, per-user licensing model allows you to deploy services on your schedule and purchase only what you need.

Power of the cloud, Office 365

Get a free trial of Office 365 today.

4 Ways Start-Ups Benefit From Office 365 / Cloud Services

You’re an innovator, focused on driving your idea into the market. You have personally selected your staff and find yourself relying on developers and other technical employees on your staff to help manage IT.  Now it is time to focus their collective knowledge and experience through cloud services that increases efficiency as your grow.

  • Anywhere Access: Fast-growing businesses will run more efficiently with Office 365. Not only is the data hosted offsite and accessed anywhere, but someone else worries about the upkeep of hardware and other server management duties. The anywhere access is one of the biggest benefits of the whole cloud experience: Imagine sending and receiving email from all your devices: mobile phone, laptop and tablet. Imagine having an enterprise-level VOIP system for client calls and webinars. Imagine having access to top of the line collaboration tools that are fully integrated with your desktop software.
  • Simple To Manage: Start-ups are the future. If you are successful you will be dealing with the eventual dilemma of figuring out the process behind mergers and acquisitions, if you haven’t already. IT is an important part of the integration planning and execution process as you merge. But, becoming one company can tax your team and focus employees on the merger, rather than innovation and revenue. With Office 365, it’s simple to add more people to your existing domain in a short time period, making the technology work for you.
  • Information Sharing: Once everyone is altogether and permissions are set, Office 365’s collaboration tools, information, data and processes are internally available to each employee. People can now really work together, regardless of location and more easily slip into defined processes.

Cloud services have changed the way we work. Gone are the days of the revolving door of software packages that were inexpensive and quickly outmoded. Having enterprise-level collaboration tools means the design department and marketing can walk hand-in-hand even though they are on separate floors. Development and project managers can communicate remotely, even though they are just next-door. It’s these tiny moves that create a spontaneous eruption of creativity and move your product to the next level.

  • Reduced Cost: In the past, there was only one thing holding you back from having this streamlined, business-focused approach: the limited IT expertise on your team. You could hire someone or you could simply save yourself some money and push your IT to the cloud with a trusted vendor and move on with your life.

Simply put, the concept of the cloud is to take the worry out of IT – to let the experts deal with the process of moving data from A to B.  There may be a few people clanging garbage can lids in the air claiming the cloud is the end of the world. We think the opposite. We think the cloud will be a catalyst for innovation and change the way we work for generations to come.