Three things to love almost Microsoft's Office 365

The beta of Microsoft'south Office 365, its suite of business organisation-focused, cloud-based applications, is out, and there's plenty of things to similar about it. Here are three reasons small businesses should requite the beta a try.

Substitution in the cloud

Microsoft Exchange offers considerable benefits for minor businesses, including security, the ability to customize how people are immune to get their email, archived e-mail, and much more.

But maintaining Exchange server hardware and software is beyond the reach of many businesses. Office 365 offers Exchange in the deject, then that a small-scale concern need not business concern itself with getting and keeping Exchange up and running. Instead, they tin can reap the benefits --- all they need to do is log into an administrator screen and run information technology from there. It tin salvage considerable time and money, and requite the smallest business the same kind of benefits that big companies exercise from Substitution.

Everywhere access to your mail

With Office 365, no matter where you are, your email is at that place every bit well. Information technology includes Outlook in the deject, so that you tin use the Web-based version of Outlook to get your e-mail from any estimator. It also offers splendid support for smartphone access to your email, including from the iPhone, Windows Phone 7 phones, and Android devices.

SharePoint for the residuum of united states

SharePoint lets you build web sites chosen Team Sites that allow everyone in your organization to collaborate on and share documents. Equally with Commutation, installing and maintaining SharePoint is beyond the capabilities of many small businesses.

In Office 365, you lot get SharePoint in the cloud, so you just need to focus on building the Team Sites, not worrying about the underlying hardware and software. Truth exist told, SharePoint still isn't for the weak of center. But spend some time with information technology, and y'all can reap considerable benefits if you've got an organization that needs to share piece of work.

By the way, this doesn't mean that Office 365 doesn't take problems --- it does, notably how poorly integrated all of its parts are. For more details near the good and the bad, see my review, Microsoft Office 365 beta: Potentially useful, occasionally frustrating.

Preston Gralla is a contributing editor for Computerworld and the writer of more than 45 books, including Windows eight Hacks (O'Reilly, 2012) and How the Internet Works (Que, 2006).

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