Why I Love Office 365 and Why Your Business Will Too

I am a technology geek. That’s not the badge of distinction it used to be, but I still wear it proudly. I have managed my personal email and web sites for years. I would write little bits of functionality to do things like share my calendar or collaborate on planning a wedding. It worked okay, but I usually spent more time building it than using it. As life got busier, I started looking for more packaged solutions. I usually went the open source route. It was better than I could build on my own, but it was still not as good as the tools used in my workplace. About five years ago I began running a SharePoint instance at home (yes, this is where it gets very geeky). It was great, but despite all sorts of networking wizardry it just was not that useful when I was not at home. User adoption of my home SharePoint solution plummeted—granted I was dealing with a user base of two people.
My technology needs had out grown my infrastructure and my ability to support what my users—okay what I—demanded. Office 365 came to the rescue. For far less than I spend on coffee each month, my household is now equipped with enterprise class email and collaboration tools.

• Family tree modeled in Managed Metadata – Done
• Appliance maintenance history calendar – Done
• Extranet site for collaborative planning of family reunion – Done
• Email and Calendar push to my Windows Phone – Done
• Integrating my TiVo via BCS – Maybe this summer

There are some things that I just can’t do with Office 365. I won’t be using PerformancePoint anytime soon to analyze the sleeping, eating and diaper patters of my new born daughter. Even though I would love to do that, Office 365 doesn’t support several Enterprise features like PerformancePoint, RecordsCenter or PowerPivot. Despite that limitation is a tremendously valuable tool. The best part is that I can access it from anywhere and I don’t have to spend Saturday nights applying the latest updates to my home server.
While my example here is likely extreme for most households, they are run-of-the-mill for many businesses.

• Company structure modeled in Managed Metadata
• Company payroll and holiday calendar
• Extranet for managing supplier relationships
• Enterprise email and calendaring using tools employees know
• Surface data out of your internal systems using BCS

It is easy to see how my domestic use of SharePoint can easily map to the management of your business. Office 365 has removed the barrier to entry for enterprise class communication tools for small to mid-sized business. You can be up and running in a very short amount of time and we would love to help you get there