Benefits of SharePoint Online

SharePoint Online (SPO) delivers the powerful features of SharePoint without the associated overhead of managing the infrastructure. It can be purchased on the cloud as a standalone offering or as part of an Office 365 suite. Let’s first have a look at Office 365(O365).

Office 365 is a cloud-based service hosted by Microsoft, designed with small businesses in mind, which includes the latest version of familiar Office applications (like Word, PowerPoint, Excel, OWA, Calendar, Conferencing etc.). It’s easy to set up and manage, without the need for IT experience, and is supported by a 99.9% uptime guarantee SLA. Isn’t it fantastic?

Here’s what is unique about it:

•    It works perfectly with the Office we know and employees don’t have to learn a new tool
•    It is designed to help us work online or offline

   Now let’s drill down back to the specifics of SharePoint Online. It’s an app coming with Office 365 and has a simple integration with Outlook, Exchange Online, SharePoint Workspace and Lync Online.

   Using four major types of sites, it allows you to share stuff on the go, organize projects, discover answers, build apps in the cloud and manage cost and risk.

What makes SPO stand ahead of its counterparts is:

•    Its new UI is touch-sensitive. It also provides the ‘Drag & Drop’ documents feature from the user’s computer to a library
•    SkyDrive Pro provides cloud storage for employees. Many of us are already aware of it
•    Yammer brings the power of social networks for knowledge exchange and document sharing
•    A site mailbox which all members can access
•    The Cloud App Model (CAM) provides a new and easy programming model for the development, installation, management, and use of apps.
•    eDiscovery allows to discover content across sites, mailboxes and libraries, and keep them in place in SPO, Exchange Online and Lync Online

Very cool features!  Aren’t they? SPO is designed to share easily, share with anyone and share responsibly. So let’s get some idea about external sharing in SPO.

External Sharing can be provided using External Access or Guest Links! Using External Access, external users sign in with an MS or O365 ID and once inside, they are treated as internal users

Using Guest Links, whoever gets the document links can view or edit using OWA.

Now, after we have gained some understanding on SPO, let’s talk about different subscription plans. It is available in a variety of plans in order to meet the needs of an organization in the best possible way!

If purchased as part of O365 suite, it is available as following:

•    Small Business
•    Midsize Business
•    Enterprise plan (E1,E2,E3,E4 Plans)
•    Kiosk workers (K1, K2 Plans)

If purchased on a standalone basis, it is available as:

•    SharePoint Online (Plan 1)
•    SharePoint Online (Plan 2)

For a list of supported features in a particular plan, check out: SPO Service Description

To summarize in one line, SharePoint Online certainly looks to be a good business move!