Five reasons why we recommend Microsoft Office 365 for email.

Microsoft’s Office 365 cloud based email service is called Microsoft Exchange.   Although the cloud based service was launched by Microsoft in 2011, it is based on the Microsoft Exchange technology  which dates back to 1996.   Prior to the cloud service becoming available,  businesses who wanted the benefits of Microsoft Exchange needed to install and maintain an expensive server in their premises.

The alternatives to Microsoft Exchange email are the email hosting services often associated with a Web hosting account. Another alternative is Google’s G suite which includes business email.

Here are the five reasons why we recommend Microsoft’s Office 365 Exchange email service.

1.       It works seamlessly across Desktop, Outlook client, mobile and web.  The underlying Exchange technology means that email is readily accessible and seamlessly synchronises across multiple devices.  It synchronises email, calendar, contacts and tasks which means having ready access to all information whether in the office, out and about or at home.

Email accounts associated with web hosting services will not support calendar, contact and task synchronisation and email synchronisation will become troublesome if there is a large amount of email in the mailbox. G suite is certainly better than web hosting email services, however Office 365 has better integration with Desktop Microsoft Outlook program.

2.       It is easy to set up.   Microsoft O365 provides a feature called Autodiscover. This means that when setting up an email account on Microsoft Outlook or on iPhones or Android phones all the user needs to do is enter the email address and password and the software automatically configures the correct settings.

3.       It has a large capacity.  Microsoft Office 365 comes with a huge 50 GBytes of email storage which means for most businesses they don’t need to constantly empty the inbox or manually clear out email.

4.       It is more secure.  Office 365 supports tight email security with features such as Multifactor Authentication (MFA). Even if hackers obtain your email password they wont be able to access to email account without additional authorisation. This is critical to prevent fraud. This is one of the many inbuilt security features that make cloud based email more secure than on premise systems.

5.       It comes with many corporate features.  Many email features that were only available to large corporate’s are now available to small business. Some of these features are shared mailboxes such as contact or info mailboxes that many staff can access. It also has boardroom booking capability. Another very useful feature is calendar sharing so office staff can set appointments for field staff and have then automatically placed in their calendar.  These are a small number of the hundreds of features in Office 365 that make a big difference to productivity.

For any questions about Microsoft Office 365 please call (03) 9555 4986 or contact us via the contact page. We offer a free consultation on Office 365 for local businesses.