What is Office 365?

You may have heard those two words quite often recently and you want to know exactly what they mean without to much marketing between the lines.

Office 365 is a set of productivity tools offered by Microsoft as a subscription. You pay per user, per month or per year and get the following for your organization:

• spam free e-mail with access from a web browser, Office Outlook, a smartphone like iPhone, Android, Windows Phone, BlackBerry, Symbian or any e-mail client. You also get personal and shared Contacts and Calendars - this is called Exchange Online
• documents stored in a central web location securely accessible from a PC, a MAC or a web browser (IE, Firefox and Safari officially suported, others work too). You can attach workflows to those documents so people interact with them in a predefined manner - you get this from SharePoint Online
• lists (for example an Asset Inventory, an Issues Tracking mini-app) - also from SharePoint Online
• intranet (you can publish internal know-how, documents, links, pictures or any kind of files) - from SharePoint Online
• public website - also from SharePoint online
• instant messaging and web conferencing - offered through Lync Online

If you want to take them for a spin, it takes 30 seconds to set up a trial.
More info from the vendor here.