Business Productivity with Microsoft Online Services

In today’s competitive global market, businesses need technology that enables flexibility and cost-effectively adds value to their organization. Internet-based hosted services provide a way to meet these objectives. They deliver feature-rich productivity tools to users while helping to relieve the burden of managing and maintaining business systems—freeing up IT departments to focus on initiatives that can deliver true competitive advantage.

Microsoft has a long history of developing and delivering innovative software and services for businesses and individuals. Designed to meet your unique business needs, our software-plus-services vision brings together the best of rich on-premise applications and flexible online services to give you ready access to the latest messaging and collaboration tools – without costly deployment and time-consuming maintenance. Microsoft® Online Services reliably delivers 99.9 percent scheduled uptime and carries a financially backed service level agreement.

Let Our IT Resources Work for You

Microsoft Online Services gives your business the powerful productivity capabilities of Microsoft Exchange Server, Microsoft Office SharePoint® Server, Microsoft Office Communications Server, and Microsoft Office Live Meeting —all hosted online and all up and running quickly and easily without the upfront costs of an on-premise deployment. The suite of productivity tools enables your workers to communicate and collaborate effectively, while enabling your IT team to focus on more business-critical tasks. And with services hosted by Microsoft, you can have peace of mind knowing that experts are managing your IT and that your services will be available when you need them.

Features and Benefits

Microsoft Online Services makes it easy for you to leverage and rapidly deploy familiar Microsoft server products as flexible services. These hosted services—our Business Productivity Online Standard Suite—include the following:

Exchange Online: Provide employees access to e-mail, calendar, and contacts from virtually anywhere, at anytime, on desktops, laptops, and mobile devices—while helping to protect against malware and spam. Exchange Online can be rapidly deployed, flexibly expanded, and is designed to be securely administered using a powerful yet easy-to-use Web-based console.
SharePoint Online: Share documents, contacts, calendars, and tasks in a single location. Based on Microsoft Office SharePoint® Server 2007, SharePoint Online delivers rich collaboration capabilities that enable team members to flexibly and efficiently collaborate, find organizational resources, search your intranet site, and manage content and workflow.
Office Live Meeting: Connect with colleagues and customers through real-time meetings, training sessions, and events using only a PC with an Internet connection. Hosted Web conferencing services from Microsoft Office Live Meeting give your employees the power to collaborate wherever they are, to set up project meetings, brainstorm ideas, and collaborate on whiteboards without the cost and hassle of travel!
Office Communications Online: Enable users to find and rapidly connect with the right person from the applications they use most. Office Communications Online provides streamlined access to rich presence and instant messaging capabilities that are centrally managed by IT and work seamlessly with a range of Microsoft Office system programs.

How it Works

Each Microsoft data center, located strategically throughout the world, houses a highly reliable complex of equipment that provides seamless connectivity to the Microsoft Online suite of services. This global network of geo-redundant data centers provides around the clock access to your business-critical collaboration services, and helps keep your data safe.

With Microsoft Online Services, your IT staff retains control over the services offered to your end users. Microsoft Online Services work seamlessly with Microsoft Active Directory®, so you can continue to manage user policies centrally and control which services are available via your existing users. A single administrative panel—with consoles for provisioning, usage, monitoring, and support—enables simple and centralized management. And your users can enjoy the convenience of a single sign-on to access all their hosted services.

International Availability

Businesses around the world can take advantage of Microsoft Online Services. In addition to the United States, services are offered in 19 countries: Australia, Austria, Belgium, Canada, Denmark, Finland, France, Germany, Ireland, Italy, Japan, Netherlands, New Zealand, Norway, Portugal, Spain, Sweden, Switzerland, and the United Kingdom.

Customers can choose to have Microsoft Online Web portals and sign-in tools display in five languages: English, French, German, Japanese, and Spanish.

Default 5 GB mailbox per each user (additional storage available for purchase)
E-mail, shared calendar, shared tasks, and contacts
Spam filtering and antivirus capabilities via Exchange Hosted Filtering
Support for Microsoft Office Outlook®, Outlook Anywhere, and Outlook Web Access
Support for Windows Mobile® 6.0 devices and other Exchange ActiveSync® 12 devices
Low cost "deskless worker" offer for users who do not currently have messaging capabilities

Portal, collaboration, content management, site search, and forms capabilities
Single location to share documents, contacts, calendars, and tasks
Offline access to documents on the service from Outlook
Roll-up views of calendars and tasks across multiple lists and sites
Blog site templates that support article posting, reader comments, and RSS feed generation
Low cost "deskless worker" offer for users who do not currently have collaboration capabilities

Web client support for remote attendee flexibility
Interactive application/desktop sharing and whiteboard tools
Active speaker video switching, multi-party video, and multi-party VoIP/ audio
Rich media presentations, native video conferencing, high-fidelity recording, and Web cam capabilities
Training and event management, with event and class registration and virtual breakout rooms

Instant messaging with text based chat using Microsoft Office Communicator 2007 client
Seamless presence awareness enabling users to check another users availability on the network
Presence information shared across Microsoft Office applications, including Outlook and SharePoint sites
Users can connect directly to the service over the Internet without RAS or VPN connections