What is Office 365? - Microsoft's most powerful subscription

Many people think of Office 365 simply as a subscription version of Microsoft Word and Excel. Office 365 is versatile;

• a software-as-a-service suite by subscription (Home Edition)
• A hosted email server that can replace an older Exchange server (Enterprise Edition).
• a Small Business Server Suite and a set of associated utilities (Enterprise Edition)
• All of the above (Business Edition Premium)

Microsoft has confused many of its customers with the names of its products. Therefore, we want to explain in more detail the diverse and valuable services that are included in Office 365.

What is Office 365?

Office 365 is the name of the software subscription service that Microsoft is moving to. It is not the name of any particular software, as is often confused.
In the past, the naming convention for Office software was simple. Office 2007, Office 2010, Office 2013, etc. Microsoft has continued this trend, and the current incarnation is Office 2019. Office 2019 can be purchased as a standalone product with a one-time purchase, but Microsoft's future plan is to do away with this model and move everyone to a subscription.

With the subscription variant, your development team will no longer release a major update to the suite every two years, but instead constantly release improvements and updates as they become available. Customers will always receive the latest version and the development team will no longer have to focus on flashy releases but on continuous improvement. Clients also get very simple licence management, which is very useful when changing staff and reallocating resources, or when transferring licences after old equipment is retired.

During this transition, Microsoft will support both versions of the platform, the standalone Office 2019 and the Office 365 subscription. So when you subscribe to Office 365, you actually get Office 2019 with regular updates and cloud syncing and backup.

What is the difference between Office 365 Home & Office 365 Business?

Well... here things get even more complicated.

Office 365 Family is the software suite you know: Word, Excel, PowerPoint, etc.

Office 365 Business is of a very different calibre. It is a set of back-office servers that provide the kind of functionality that a small business in-house server used to need.

These are:

1. Exchange Server: a line of messaging and collaboration software from Microsoft consisting of an email server, an email client and various groupware applications. The Microsoft Exchange line is widely used in large companies and is often used in conjunction with Microsoft Outlook. Exchange Server allows a company's users to securely access communication tools such as email, voicemail, instant messaging and SMS from their desktops, web browsers or mobile devices.
2. Onedrive - A cloud-based file storage mechanism that synchronises a folder on your computer with a folder in Microsoft's data centre. An efficient way to synchronise data between multiple PCs and have it available online at all times.
3. Sharepoint - A web-based file sharing and process automation utility with advanced document management features such as "check out, check in" to track who makes changes to a file and revision control to compare and retrieve/restore previous versions of files.
4. Web versions of Word, Excel, Outlook, etc.
5. Several secondary tools such as "Microsoft Teams", a group chat application, and Sway, an online presentation tool similar to PowerPoint.

And to confuse things even more, you can purchase an addon to the Office 365 for Business backend tools that gives you the Microsoft Office software suite (Office 2019) mentioned above. It's called Office 365 Business PREMIUM.

Confused?

They are not the only ones. When we suggest a business invest in Office 365 Business for their collaboration suite, they say, "We already upgraded our office software last year" or "We already have Word". Most people don't know about the powerful tools and servers available to small businesses through an Office 365 Business subscription.
We hope that Microsoft will consider changing the name Office 365 Enterprise to "Office Server Online" or "Business Server 365" and keep the name Office 365 for the

Office software suite itself. Any improvement to the confusing names would be welcome.
Still confused? If you have any questions, you can contact us here
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