SBS 2011 Essentials and Office 365 -- Great Value for Our Customers

[Today’s post comes to us courtesy of Enrico Toro, Senior Product Manager from Windows Server Marketing]

Congratulations to the Office 365 (O365) team for reaching their general availability milestone on Tuesday.

Office 365 provides its subscribers with great value and functionality by giving them a convenient solution to access professional grade email, documents, contacts, and calendars. It includes a full collaboration suite and offers familiar tools make it easy to connect and work with others.

We shared the same product philosophy of providing value and functionality when we designed Windows Small Business Server (SBS) 2011 Essentials for businesses that do not have a server and find that a traditional server is too much for their needs. With this release, we want to give our customers a first server that provides core functionality and a better infrastructure.

What’s really exciting is that you can use SBS 2011 Essentials with O365. This means you can run the core infrastructure you need on-premise and work with online services such as O365 for collaboration and line of business (LOB) application support.

Together, SBS Essentials and O365 help improve employee productivity and business efficiency by merging the network security and data safety that the server provides, with the no-hassle, flexible productivity tools that the online suite provides.

Better IT means more time to focus on your core business, as David Whitener, of David Whitener Inc, experienced. In his words, “Now that we can depend on Windows Small Business Server 2011 Essentials for backups and a Microsoft cloud-based service for reliable e-mail, we can focus on building our reputation for great customer service.”

But this is not the whole story. This fall we will make available the Office 365 Integration Module for SBS Essentials; this module will provide customers with additional functionality to combine these two products without increasing complexity.

The integration module will enable small businesses to simply administer their users both local and cloud in one single place, for instance adding all local users into Office 365 and effortlessly using a single custom domain name for both SBSS 2011 Essentials and Office 365.

To learn the details on how a small business can take advantage of O365 and SBS 2011 Essentials working together watch the following videos:

So do not wait any longer, download the trial versions of SBS 2011 Essentials and Office 365 and discover how the two products work together help small businesses grow, and if you are a partner sign up with the Microsoft Cloud Essentials Pack and gain for Office 365 for a year for free.