AUTHOR: Allen with the Office 365 Group at Microsoft

Reposting from Microsoft Office 365 Blog

With hundreds of millions of users, Microsoft Office is practically synonymous with business productivity. As the world grows more complex and interconnected, the definition of business productivity has expanded. Whether it's a financial analyst mastering thousands (or millions) of rows of data in Excel, a distributed team sharing documents with a SharePoint Team Site, or a CEO presenting to shareholders using a video-enhanced PowerPoint deck, Office has always been about enabling people to do more.

Now, Office 365 takes that familiar Office desktop experience-as well as the online Office experience through Outlook Web App, Lync Web App, and Office Web Apps-and lights them up with new capabilities. These capabilities are available right from the Office client, so people can use them without having to learn new technology or even switch applications.  

• Lync Online enables click-to-communicate from within Office so users can get in touch with a colleague to get information, make a time-sensitive decision, or for an impromptu collaboration session. Rich presence information helps users figure out which is the most appropriate way to connect-a phone call, email, or just a quick instant message.

• Simultaneous editing via SharePoint Online lets multiple people work on the same Word document or PowerPoint presentation at the same time-no more "taking turns" or sending documents back and forth as email attachments.

• SharePoint My Sites help users find each other by sharing their specialized knowledge. Adding interests and responsibilities to profiles makes it easier for colleagues to find each other through news feeds, ask and answer questions, and to connect in other ways. This not only helps them get work done, it supports the social and professional connections that users in large organizations crave.

• SharePoint also includes social tagging functionality, enabling communities to organize information in ways that make sense for them.

• Role based access control enables administrators to safely delegate tasks to specialist users. So, for example, a compliance officer can be granted the ability to perform multi-mailbox search for litigation purposes. IT professionals don't have to spend their time performing tasks that they are not necessarily trained to do, and neither do they have to grant full administrative rights to the compliance officer.

All of these capabilities represent an expansion of what productivity means in today's enterprise organizations, to include how people connect, collaborate, and share information wherever they are. At the same time, they are delivered through the Office experience people already know. So, not only is there less training involved to get them up and running, these are capabilities that users can actually use. 

Get more information on productivity with Office Professional Plus and Office 365 here.

Thanks for reading!

-Allen, Office 365 Product Manager