Office 365

 Office 365

  Basic Information

Office 365 provides powerful services like business-class email, online storage, and teamwork solutions that you can access from anywhere.

Primary Use:

• [General] Access your Microsoft Office (PowerPoint, excel, Word, Outlook) and other services, such as email and collaboration, from Microsoft’s cloud server.
• [Faculty] Reports, Presentations, Lessons
• [Students] Presentations, Projects, Lessons

Key Features:

• Multiple people can edit the same document at once (in Word, PowerPoint or Excel)
• Share the file links with anyone and can set sharing settings
• Link both your OneDrive for Business and personal OneDrive account and easily toggle between them
• Write a to-do list in OneNote and then easily convert it to tasks with deadlines and reminders in your calendar
• Automatically suggest images to you based on the words in your presentation and it updates as you add/edit words
• Allows you to electronically sign and email docs using DocuSign
• Turn data into a map with Power Map in Excel
• Convert it into a Word document without the formatting issues that come along with copy and pasting or editing

What is Office 365? Microsoft’s best productivity apps

Category: Collaborative Tool

Keywords: Collaboration, Cloud, Microsoft

 Detailed Information

Full Description:

Office 365 is more than just Word, Excel, PowerPoint, and Outlook. It provides powerful services like business-class email, online storage, and teamwork solutions that you can access from anywhere. Bring teams and resources together with solutions like Microsoft Teams and Skype for Business that make working together more productive and enjoyable regardless of where participants are located. Microsoft Office 365 provides a comprehensive set of software tools and services that facilitate office documentation, communication and management tasks. No upfront installation or integration is required, other than an Internet connection and supporting Web browser. The Microsoft Office 365 suite of applications includes several different online services, including Office Professional Plus, Exchange Online, SharePoint Online, Lync Online and a lighter version of Office Suite, presented as Office Web Apps.

Tool Access

To access the tool online or for a related download link (if available) please see sources below:

• Free for Eligible Teachers and Students using Office 365 for Education
• Choose to their Paid Plans
• Download in Windows, Mac, and your mobile devices

Advantage/ Disadvantage:

Accessibility is the biggest asset of Office 365 for the user. The ability to use a computer as a platform to reach the cloud allows for interchangeability and access from anywhere. The mail app also runs smoother in the web browser when you are sharing calendars. This function used to consistently crash our computers when sharing a calendar on the Outlook Desktop Application. In a Microsoft Office administrative installation, more disk space is used on the server, the amount of disk space required on the server ranges between 100 and 325 MB or more, depending on the version of Microsoft Office, if other programs use your server network or if you use it to store data files, it is possible that the server does not have enough disk space, however, this problem is more due to the limited storage of the PCs than the program itself, what it does have is a cost per license very high, apart from that I find no disadvantages that subtract points in favor of Microsoft Office.

Good for Teaching:

Hosting all your school files or student files in the cloud may sound like a hindrance. The assumption is that with the file in your possession on a flash drive or other storage device, you have greater control of when and how you interact with your files. The truth is that so long as you have an internet connection, you can connect to Office 365, and your files. This means that students can write their papers in the classroom and at home on whatever device they so choose. Again, if you have an internet connection, you have access to your files.

Good for Learning:

Office 365 for education, an evolution of Microsoft’s Live@edu offering, gives students, teachers, administrators and staff free, cloud-based access to e-mail, ­calendars and contacts (Exchange Online); ­document storage and sharing and ­website management (SharePoint Online); instant messaging, presence, and audio and video conferencing (Lync Online); and the Microsoft Office productivity suite, including Word, Excel, PowerPoint and OneNote (Office Web Apps). With these cloud-based tools, teachers and students can communicate and collaborate — and learning can continue — even when bad weather or emergencies force school closures. What’s more, schools can provide a full range of productivity tools without having to find money in the budget to pay for them.

  Reviews [For Future Use]

Public and Internal reviews on the quality of the tool and ease of use to learn/ implement.

  Learning Expectation [For Future Use]

General guidelines of how long it typically takes to learn and be comfortable (basic, advanced, expert levels) with the tool as well as what capabilities users have at each level.

• Level of difficulty to learn/ use for each level:
  • Basic  Use/ substitution: 2-4 hours of use
    • General familiarity with the tool
    • Ability to import documents in from MS Word or Powerpoint
    • Ability to create a simple document and share
  • Advanced Use/ augmentation: 20- 30 hours of use
    • General comfort with the tool
    • Ability to make a presentation from scratch including text, graphics, video, and with basic thoughts on style.
  • Expert use/ transformative (modification / redefinition): 40+ hours of use
    • Complete comfort with the tool
    • Ability to offer advice and guidance to others on the tool
    • Ability to use the tool for various design purposes: presentation, booklet, ePortofolio…
    • Understanding of layout, style (font, colors, themes) to meet end users needs

 Examples

Additional Examples:

• Office 365 Presentations
• Empower your End Users Example
• See Lessons for more education examples

  Tutorial Guides

To learn the tool in a comprehensive manner, please see public and internal lessons below. It does not cover every features but highlights the main features.

• Beginner: Manage Office 365 with PowerShell (40 minutes)
• Intermediate: Integrate with Office 365 APIs in your Visual Studio 2015 (20 minutes)
• Intermediate: Rapidly Implement Microsoft #Office365 Project Online (1 hour)

   Product Support