Office 365 Small Business Premium: Working together

Author: Jon Orton_MSFT Originally published to the Office 365 Preview blog. Today we’ll look at how Office 365 Small Business Premium helps you work together with others. If your business is like most small businesses, you not only need to collaborate with people inside your company, but also with customers, clients, suppliers, and partners. Office 365 helps you do this more effectively, giving you easy ways to share documents, manage projects, conduct meetings, and connect with others.   Sharing documents Office 365 includes a password-protected portal called a team site that lets you share large, hard-to-email files both inside and outside your company. It serves as a single location for the latest versions of documents, no matter how many people are working on them. Everyone has access to the most up-to-date materials, so there’s no need to email multiple versions back and forth.  To access your company’s team site, click the “Sites” link on the Office 365 navigation bar. A set of getting started tiles makes it easy to customize your site. For example, if you click “What’s your style,” you can choose a template to change the site’s look and feel.    Other tiles in the getting started section help you adjust who can access the site, as well as add apps to make the site more useful. Getting files into your team site is easier than ever. You now have the ability to drag and drop files into the site directly from your desktop. Once the files are there, they are accessible by the other people in your company, and you have the option to share them with people outside of your business. Inviting external people to work with you on documents has been greatly simplified. You can share an individual document directly from any Office application, by choosing “Share” and entering the person’s email address. Or you can share documents from the team site, where you now get an embedded preview of the document you are about to share, so that you can make sure it is the right one.     If you are working with a customer or a partner on a project that involves multiple documents, you can create a sub-site within your team site. That makes it easy to keep all the relevant documents in one place and manage who has access. If the people you are sharing documents with don’t have Office installed on their computers, that’s no problem. Using just a web browser, they can view Office documents, edit them, and even co-author documents with you in real-time using Office Web Apps. To learn more, see Get started with SharePoint . Managing projects Your team site can do more than just store and share files. It also can help you manage group projects. To add project management capabilities to your team site, click the “Working on a deadline” getting started tile.   This will add a tasks application and a shared calendar to your team site. As you create tasks and assign them to people, Office 365 builds a timeline view that gives everyone an easy-to-understand picture of the project plan. The task view includes a timeline of the project, a countdown to the next milestone, a list of late tasks, and a list of upcoming tasks. The project management capabilities are built-in, easy to use, and fully integrated with your team site. Learn more about how to get started with a project site . Online meetings   In the Office 365 Preview, online meetings with your customers and partners are simpler to set up and more interactive. You can easily move from instant messaging conversations to ad-hoc online meetings that include audio, video, and screen sharing with just a few mouse clicks. Whether your meeting is spur-of-the-moment or scheduled ahead of time, you can enjoy high-definition video conferencing and share notes in real time to keep everyone on the same page.  Guests outside your company can join meetings from a web browser, using Lync Web App. They can enjoy a first-class meeting experience, including multi-party HD video/audio, instant messaging, and desktop, application, and PowerPoint sharing. Learn more by reading Set up Lync Online . In summary, Office 365 Small Business Premium makes it easier than ever for you to work together with team members, customers, and partners. You can share document, manage projects, and meet in high definition, so that everyone stays connected.  

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Office 365 Small Business Premium: Working together


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