Small and medium-sized businesses are certainly not without options in regards to how they manage their documents, store their files, access word processing applications, internally communicate, and send emails. Not only can they choose to take advantage of a managed IT service provider, internal IT department, or subscription service, but there are also a variety of specialized services to choose from within these options. Furthermore, businesses are not required to limit themselves to only one, and they can choose to access a subscription service, coordinate their IT team with IT Consulting services , or use their own IT department to manage their subscription services. As an IT Managed Services Provider the question has recently been raised as to whether small and medium-sized businesses should choose Office 365 or Hosted Exchange.

On September 22^nd the new Microsoft Office 2016 suite was released and includes new versions of

• Word
• Excel
• PowerPoint
• OneNote
• Outlook
• Project
• Visio
• Access

While there are a few new, helpful features in each program the main points of functionality are sharing and accessing documents from anywhere, on any device and facilitating in better productivity within the workplace. 

It took me a few minutes to figure it out so I thought I’d share how it’s done.

• Open a web browser to https://Portal.MicrosoftOnline.com.
• Log in to your Office 365 with an account that has the necessary administrative credentials.
• After logging in, click the Admin dropdown in the upper right corner and select Exchange.  (See  Fig. 1 below).

It's your data, you own it, you control it and it is yours to take with you if you decide to leave the service.  But how secure is Office 365?  Read on:

Built in Security

• Service-level security through definense-in depth
• Customer controls within the service
• Security hardening and operational best practices

Office 365 is a security-hardened service, designed following the Microsoft Security Development Lifecycle. Microsoft brings together the best practices from two decades of building enterprise software and managing online services to give you an integrated software-as-a-service (SaaS) solution.