The latest edition of NZ TechNet Flash is now available.

Guest Editorial: Paul Quirk

Welcome to this week's TechNet Flash.

In October this year we announced Office 365, which brings together the Cloud versions of Exchange, SharePoint, and Lync, with our Microsoft Office products both on the desktop and in the Cloud.

Available in 2011, Office 365 is designed to meet the needs of organisations of all sizes - everyone from sole proprietors to small businesses and enterprises to educational institutions - helping them to save time, money and free up valued resources.

Office 365 Key Benefits:

  • Access to e-mail, documents, contacts, and calendars on nearly any device
  • Simple and secure collaboration with colleagues and business partners
  • Works seamlessly with Microsoft Office
  • Pay as you go pricing options billed monthly
  • Get the latest features of our enterprise class software including the Office Suite.

This is a Business class offering including:

  • 24 x 7 IT Pro level phone support
  • Financially-backed 99.9% uptime
  • Geo-redundant datacentres
  • Built-in fault tolerance
  • Couple with Microsoft's robust security/privacy controls and standards

Office 365 will initially be offered in three versions:

  • Office 365 for small businesses that are looking for cloud-based productivity tools without the IT hassles
  • Office 365 for enterprises that want to move their productivity tools to the cloud, while staying in control of their IT services
  • Office 365 for educational institutions looking to save money and give students access to familiar productivity tools

Something which appeals to our larger customers is the introduction of Identity Federation within Office 365. When you set up identity federation, your users can use their Active Directory corporate credentials (user name and password) to access services in Microsoft Office 365. Identity federation in Office 365 uses Active Directory Federation Services 2.0 (AD FS) to achieve this. Read about the benefits and the requirements for using this feature. To learn more about the exciting features of the products which make up Office 365 then visit the sites below for their Service Descriptions.

For existing BPOS customers, the Office 365 Transition Centre is your one stop shop for on-going guidance and discussion about the transition. At the transition centre today you will find: a checklist to help you start planning, an extensive FAQ and details about Office 365 system requirements. We will publish more detailed guidance to the transition centre as we come closer to launch.

Merry Christmas, and have a happy new year!

 

quirk

Paul Quirk
Productivity Specialist
Microsoft New Zealand

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