Microsoft® Office 365 For Dummies®

Introduction

Any fool can make things bigger and more complex. It takes a touch of genius — and a lot of courage — to move in the opposite direction.

— Albert Einstein

In the last few years, the cloud has taken the information technology community by storm. As companies have struggled with the learning curve and cost of adopting Enterprise class software on their own the cloud has created a simplified and streamlined alternative. The complexity of keeping software running has been taken out of the equation. The result is that organizations can focus on using software to drive business and competitive advantage instead of using critical resources to keep the lights blinking green.

Office 365 is the newest cloud offering by Microsoft and bundles the popular SharePoint, Exchange, Lync, and Office into a single product that is accessed over the Internet. Because Microsoft runs these server products in their data centers with their engineers, you can be assured that they know what they are doing. After all, who better to manage these products than the same people who actually built them in the first place? To ease the mind of the risk averse, Microsoft puts their company name and piles of cash behind Office 365 in a very attractive service level agreement.

For those who are still not convinced, Microsoft has taken the unique step of designing Office 365 in a way that lets you use the Enterprise software in a hybrid environment. Should you want to keep some of your data and management ...