Microsoft understands in order to be productive and differentiate yourself from competitors, it is very important that the technology you use makes it easy and effective to work together within your organization and with your partners and customers. Office 365 allows you to stay connected and work effectively through cloud-based business email, shared calendars, document sharing, and high definition video conferencing.
Share insights - improved information flow:
In order to work together effectively, you need to be able to share insights and improve information flow.
With SharePoint, you can save all the documents, pictures, inventory database, meeting notes, and project timeline centrally and make them easily searchable by everyone in the company so you can share insights, real time data, expertise, and project status openly and more effectively.
You can provide external users with secured extranet access to project sites or documents so it is easier to share confidential information and larger files with partners and customers.
Effective meetings for enhanced communications:
With Office 365 you can schedule online [Lync] meetings with colleagues, partners, and customers, even if they are not using Lync or Office 365. The online meeting includes audio, video, IM, screen sharing, and white boarding for maximum and effective communications regardless of whether the team is in the same building or spread around the world.
With Office 365, you can see the free/busy status on all your colleagues’ calendars (through Outlook) from around the world, making it easy for scheduling with multiple people. There is even multi-language support for international organizations and Lync includes instant translation for IM conversations, making it even easier to communicate with your co-workers, partners, and customers around the world.
Editing documents at the same time:
With SharePoint Online, you can save and share your files online easily with others — even with people not using Office 365— and you can work in the same document at the same time as others, so you don’t have to email them back and forth, worry about version conflicts, or wait for others to finish and check back in the documents before you can go in.
SharePoint Online does a good job managing multiple authors within the same document by locking a particular section of a document when one person is editing.
Because all the services are connected, when you have multiple authors within the same document, you will see their names and presence and you can start an IM within Office to talk about the changes while you are editing.
Cross-platform support:
To truly make it easy to work together, Office 365 supports multiple platforms, including Windows, Mac, Windows Phone, iOS, Android, Blackberry, and Symbian.
More specifically, the screenshots you see here are of Lync Mobile on a Windows Phone, iPhone, and Android.
With Office Web Apps available on all major browsers including Internet Explorer, Firefox, Safari, and Chrome, you can work together on any computer with an internet connection.
