Office 365 puts your business in the cloud

Now, Microsoft is also jumping on the train and is currently promoting it's product “Office 365” on a global level. The general concept: Accessing and sharing your company data with your co-workers anywhere, anytime, from any possible device. For example, clients can use Microsoft Exchange in order to access their mails and contacts via a web browser, or share appointments that were noted in their online calendar. With “Office Web Apps”, co-workers are able to jointly work on a document online – and SharePoint offers them the possibility to save and open documents via the web.

Different solutions

With “Office 365“, Microsoft aims for corporations as well as for SMEs as target groups– but, in fact, competition is high. Firstly, there is Google Apps: With this, Microsoft's competitor also offers a possibility to collaborate online: Documents can be edited and shared, as well as calendar dates – and, of course, there is Gmail, which is a decent Emailing-System that works perfectly online.

In addition to that, there is also competition from Microsoft itself: Freelancers might think that they don't need SharePoint, since they can get similar Microsoft-products for free: Hotmail as a mailing service, SkyDrive as an online space for your files – and within SkyDrive, you can even edit the word documents online. Of course, one advantage of the (paid) SharePoint in comparison to (free) SkyDrive is the possibility to more easily edit documents online at the same time and therefore collaborate seamlessly – but in case companies don't need this feature, they might as well stick with the free product or play with the competition.

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