Online Resources to Discover and Learn about Office 365

Outlook

Outlook is your Personal Information Manager, a central location for emails, calendar, contacts and tasks which can be synchronised to your mobile device(s). It now connects and synchronises with Exchange, seamlessly enabling connections with a variety of mobile hardware and Operating Systems.

Outlook can be configured to access not just your own Mailbox, but also ‘Shared’ organisational Mailboxes and Public Folders, for example, info@.... or a shared (public to the organisation) Marketing Folder. Sharing enables you to ‘Send on Behalf of’ or ‘Send as’ the Shared Mailbox. Any user within your organisation can also be given ‘Delegate’ access permissions to a colleague's Mailbox, for example, a PA who needs access to a Manager’s Mailbox to administer their calendar or email.

Outlook Calendar

The Calendar contains your own calendar and, where permissions have been granted, colleagues' and other public and shared calendars. Contacts can contain your specific Contacts as well as the Organisation’s Global Address List.

Outlook Tasks

Tasks can be created by you, assigned to or from a colleague, progressed and completed. All of this can be configured to your working style and/or company policy using folders, categories, flags and conditional formatting.

Office 365 Outlook

As a core feature of Office 365, Outlook is one of my favourite tools. I particularly like its use of Categories and Flags, which help to highlight content of interest or tasks to target for completion. As mentioned above, it is a central location for information, and as such, its direct integration with, for example, OneNote, where I can write notes for a meeting and then link to the meeting appointment in Outlook, is a real benefit to not forgetting to raise a topic or idea in the meeting.

Outlook Resources

Microsoft Support for Outlook

Outlook Tips

How To Use Outlook

Exchange Online

Exchange Online is actually the email server that processes email and allows it to be retrieved by Outlook. It’s a hosted messaging application that provides organisations with access to email, calendars, contacts and tasks.

What does Exchange Online do?

Exchange Online supports remote access for users from desktops, laptops, tablets and a wide range of mobile devices, including Apple, Android, Blackberry, and, of course, Windows and is most commonly accessed using Outlook or Outlook Web Access.

Exchange Online Resources

Microsoft Exchange Online Explained

SharePoint Online

SharePoint made its first appearance in 2001, and it has been developed significantly since that time. A basic SharePoint installation can be set up and configured by a trained IT Administrator; however, for more visual changes and tweaks, it is best to seek help from a SharePoint specialist.

What is SharePoint?

A web-based collaboration tool integrated with Office 365 for business that enables multiple individuals and teams to work on documents simultaneously. SharePoint comes in different editions: SharePoint Server, SharePoint Standard, SharePoint Enterprise and SharePoint Online.

The collaboration tool SharePoint Online is used for file hosting and document and content management and is updated frequently, as is all of Office 365. It is tightly integrated with other tools, especially Outlook (via Exchange), so you can be notified when new or changed files are added or modified on SharePoint.

What does SharePoint include?

Intranets, for example, storing and sharing policy, finance and HR information.
Project sites, for storing and communicating project information. These sites can be set up individually, or automatically after you set up an Outlook ‘group’.
Sales bids/new business, when working with groups of people together to create a bid or proposal.

It’s also worth noting that organisations should be careful when considering simply moving all files from a file server to SharePoint. We recommend really assessing the business benefit of a complete move of all file data. More often than not, we see better results when file servers are used alongside Sharepoint for certain scenarios.