Office 365 for enterprises: Part 2 - Best Productivity Experience

  • Article

AUTHOR: Allen with the Office 365 Group at Microsoft

Reposting from Microsoft
Office 365 Blog

With hundreds of millions of users, Microsoft Office is
practically synonymous with business productivity. As the world grows more
complex and interconnected, the definition of business productivity has
expanded. Whether it's a financial analyst mastering thousands (or millions) of
rows of data in Excel, a distributed team sharing documents with a SharePoint
Team Site, or a CEO presenting to shareholders using a video-enhanced
PowerPoint deck, Office has always been about enabling people to do more.

Now, Office 365 takes that familiar Office desktop
experience-as well as the online Office experience through Outlook Web App,
Lync Web App, and Office Web Apps-and lights them up with new capabilities.
These capabilities are available right from the Office client, so people can
use them without having to learn new technology or even switch applications.  

  • Lync Online enables click-to-communicate
    from within Office so users can get in touch with a colleague to get
    information, make a time-sensitive decision, or for an impromptu
    collaboration session. Rich presence information helps users figure out
    which is the most appropriate way to connect-a phone call, email, or just
    a quick instant message.
  • Simultaneous editing via SharePoint
    Online lets multiple people work on the same Word document or PowerPoint
    presentation at the same time-no more "taking turns" or sending
    documents back and forth as email attachments.
  • SharePoint My Sites help users find each
    other by sharing their specialized knowledge. Adding interests and
    responsibilities to profiles makes it easier for colleagues to find each
    other through news feeds, ask and answer questions, and to connect in
    other ways. This not only helps them get work done, it supports the social
    and professional connections that users in large organizations crave.
  • SharePoint also includes social tagging
    functionality, enabling communities to organize information in ways that
    make sense for them.
  • Role based access control enables
    administrators to safely delegate tasks to specialist users. So, for
    example, a compliance officer can be granted the ability to perform
    multi-mailbox search for litigation purposes. IT professionals don't have
    to spend their time performing tasks that they are not necessarily trained
    to do, and neither do they have to grant full administrative rights to the
    compliance officer.

All of these capabilities represent an expansion of what
productivity means in today's enterprise organizations, to include how people
connect, collaborate, and share information wherever they are. At the same
time, they are delivered through the Office experience people already know. So,
not only is there less training involved to get them up and running, these are
capabilities that users can actually use. 

Get more information on productivity with Office
Professional Plus and Office 365 here.

Thanks for reading!

-Allen, Office 365 Product Manager