Office 365
- At June 05, 2015
- By liquid
- In News
- 0
Having upgraded a number of customers to Office 365 we now feel we can recommend this as the preferred replacement for earlier versions of Office. At first site paying a monthly fee for the use of Word, Excel and Outlook appears to be an expensive approach, particularly if you do not intend upgrading versions more often than every 2 to 3 years. However, as companies have found it necessary to upgrade servers and their operating systems, the problem of replacing Exchange Server, the software that manages and controls email distribution, has raised an important issue. Most of our customers have been using a variety of versions of ‘Small Business Server’ as their chosen server operating system which has always included a version of Exchange. However Microsoft no longer provide an equivalent Small Business Server product so if users wish to continue using Exchange on their own server then they have to purchase Exchange as a separate product and this can be very expensive. Office 365 however doesn’t only provide for the use of Word, Excel and Outlook but, if the correct version is purchased, can provide a ‘cloud based’ replacement for the traditional Exchange server whereby all of the mailbox configuration traditionally done on the end user’s server is maintained on Microsoft’s servers and Outlook users connect to their mailboxes across the internet. Furthermore, an Office 365 user license allows a user to load and use Word, Excel and Outlook on up to 5 different devices (e.g. a Pc at work, a Pc at home and a laptop). When the option to not replace your own Exchange Server is taken into account Office 365 becomes much more attractive and we have found it to work very well, particularly where users are connecting to email from multiple locations on multiple devices.