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Getting Started with Office 365

  • Article

Over the past few years, I have had many discussions with Microsoft customers and partners about the best way to get started with Office 365. This blog post will cover 2 main areas that we often discuss together:

  • Key use cases and scenarios for getting started
  • Resources to help you on your journey

Key Use Cases and Scenarios for Getting Started

Historically many customers have begun their Office 365 journey with Exchange Online. While Exchange remains a key part of Office 365, many customers are looking for additional solutions that offer quick “time to value” and business benefits.

Here are 5 of the top scenarios that many of my customers have been leveraging within Office 365:

  1. Office 365 ProPlus enables you to leverage Office on up to 15 devices per user including Windows, Mac, iOS, and Android devices. You are also able to leverage Office Online to create, view, and edit Word, Excel, PowerPoint, and OneNote files in Office 365 using your web browser (Internet Explorer, Firefox, Chrome, or Safari). 
  2. OneDrive for Business provides each user with 1TB of cloud storage. In addition to a great cross platform browser experience, native OneDrive for Business clients/apps have been released for Windows, iOS, and Android devices with a Mac client under development.
  3. SharePoint Online includes OneDrive for Business and also offers capabilities to provide Extranet, Team, and Project Sites to your employees, customers, and partners which can be setup quickly and securely and then accessed anywhere and from any device.
  4. Yammer is Microsoft’s enterprise social networking platform which many customers are leveraging internally and externally to “work like a network”.
  5. Lync Online provides instant messaging, presence, video/desktop/application sharing, and web conferencing.

Resources to Help You on Your Journey

  1. The Office 365 Fast Track site has recently been updated to include resources to help you get started with Office 365 and continue to drive sustained adoption.
  2. The Office 365 Success Center provides resources to help with planning for a successful rollout.
  3. The Office 365 Learning Center links to various end user training materials.
  4. The Office 365 Service Descriptions provide all of the technical details of what you can and cannot do in Office 365 with links to articles to help you get up and running quickly.
  5. Looking for technical training? The Microsoft Virtual Academy is your single source for great technical training for Office 365 administrators.
  6. Want to get connected to other Office 365 customers, partners, and Microsoft employees? Join the more than 20,000 people that are already on the Office 365 Technical Network on Yammer.
  7. The Office 365 technology blog is THE blog for staying up to date on Office 365 news and announcements.
  8. Check out the Office 365 public roadmap site to see what has been recently released and what features/services are currently under development.