OFFICE 365 SERVICES

One of the most popular software suites in the world, Microsoft Office is used by 1.5bn people worldwide. Almost everyone who used a computer in the past thirty years will have come into contact with Microsoft Word, Excel, or PowerPoint, sent an email through Outlook, or messaged someone on Skype.
Millions of modern businesses rely on the suite’s tools to communicate, create documents, and balance their books.
But there’s a lot more to Office than many users realize, particularly since the release of Office 365.

What is Office 365?

Launched in 2001, Office 365 is a cloud-based, subscription model version of Microsoft’s popular productivity suite Microsoft Office. Office 365 contains the same core applications as traditional versions of Office, including Word, Excel, PowerPoint, Outlook, OneNote, and depending on the plan purchased, may also include other apps and services such as Publisher, Planner, OneDrive, Exchange, SharePoint, Access, Skype, Yammer, and Microsoft Teams.

There are a number of different packages available when licensing Office 365, including versions for personal use, multi-user households, students, businesses, nonprofits, and education institutions.

There are also online- and mobile-only versions of Office, known as Office Online, through which users can get access to feature-limited versions of Office apps for free.

How is Office 365 different from previous versions of Office?

Office 365 is a subscription-based service, meaning rather than buying a copy of the suite outright for a one-time, up-front cost, users instead pay a monthly subscription fee to access the service at a level of their choosing.

With Office 365’s subscription-based model, users always have access to the latest version, as the platform is updated at Microsoft’s end, whereas as perpetual, on-premise users would have to buy a new copy of the latest edition to be able to use new features.

Office 365 is also built as a cloud-first application; although desktop versions of its apps are available with certain plans, it is designed to be used online. All applications, services, and data generated by Office 365 are hosted on Microsoft’s servers.

Users do not need to install software or maintain any hardware on which to run it. Office 365 also comes with email hosting, and cloud storage space, so users can host their files online and have access to them wherever and whenever they need to, from any device that connects to the internet.

Being cloud-based, Office 365 also comes with a host of features not available in previous, perpetual versions.