Office 365 is poised to rapidly become the most successful enterprise communication, content, and collaboration offering on the market. It builds on Microsoft’s on-premises experience with Exchange and SharePoint and adds significant new capabilities, resulting from Microsoft’s strategic focus on cloud and mobile market dynamics. A combination of reimagined features and new tools have created considerable enterprise end user demand; two of those key features are Office Online and Microsoft’s mobile-first commitment.
Microsoft’s mobile-first commitment makes Office 365 tools seamlessly available for PC, Mac, Android, iOS, and Windows Phone, without requiring developers or content creators to address platform-specific details. Office Online makes it possible to have rich Word, Excel, PowerPoint, and OneNote experiences in leading browser clients, and to easily embed Office documents in the new Office 365 article and Sway authoring environments. CASAHL, exclusively focused on the content/collaboration domain since 1993, believes that these new capabilities make the question of whether or not to take advantage of the new capabilities offered by Office 365 mission-critical for enterprises.
Key Office 365 Capabilities
OneDrive for Business:
integrating cloud storage throughout Office 365 and Office 2016 with the power of Microsoft Azure infrastructure services
Office Graph and Office Delve:
leveraging the rich activity model in Office 365 and machine learning to simplify and advance enterprise search and discovery activities, moving beyond the limits of earlier, more silo-oriented solutions
Office 365 Groups:
seamlessly integrating key capabilities from Exchange Online (conversations and calendaring), OneDrive for Business, and OneNote, with the security and flexibility of Azure Active Directory
Office 365 Sites:
delivering much of the power and flexibility of SharePoint but with considerably simplified administration
Power BI:
driving data analysis and visualizations with a new, powerful, and flexible tool that draws from data sources including Excel workbooks, popular DBMSs, and Web services such as Google Analytics
Microsoft will continue to invest in Office 365 as its strategic communication, content, and collaboration platform, making Delve, for example, the foundation of a new intranet framework (code-named “Infopedia”), and adding Skype and Yammer to the list of Office 365 tools that can be seamlessly embedded in a content/collaboration context.
Overall, Office 365 represents a significant advance relative to Microsoft’s earlier and on-premises solutions. Office 365 success is neither automatic nor guaranteed, however; the power and utility of Office 365 are a function of the enterprise content and collaborative apps made available to enterprise users. That’s where CASAHL’s DART solution for Office 365 is focused (please continue here to learn how the CASAHL DART solution for Office 365 helps enterprises accelerate Office 365 adoption, and continue reading about CASAHL’s offerings here).