Cloud Integration Solutions

Office 365 is Microsoft's growing line of productivity applications and cloud services available on a monthly or annual subscription basis. Office 365 apps and cloud services are offered in a variety of product bundles, or subscription plans, intended for customers ranging from students and households to major corporations.

The most popular Microsoft Office 365 applications can be installed on multiple devices including Windows PCs, Macs, tablets, and iPhones and Android smartphones. These multi-device applications include Office Word, Excel, PowerPoint, OneNote and Outlook. PC-only applications include Microsoft Access and Office Publisher. To address users with multiple computing devices, many packages permit you to put Office applications on several devices. As an example, Office 365 Business and ProPlus subscription plans permit every Office app to be installed on up to five devices.

Progent can provide quick and affordable remote access to consultants with expert knowledge of Microsoft, Mac, Apple iOS, and Google Android software. Progent can help you to understand the many packages offered with Office 365 and configure your IT network with Office 365 in a way that delivers maximum strategic value. Progent can help you manage multi-vendor networks that incorporate Microsoft Windows, Apple macOS or OS X, and Linux based products. Progent can also help you to deploy and manage hybrid networks that seamlessly combine local and cloud resources.

Microsoft Office 365 Apps and Cloud Services
Office 365 plans are designed for a broad selection of markets such as businesses, schools, government, and home. Some plans, like Office 365 Business Essentials, has no apps but only cloud services. Others, such as Office 365 Business, offers applications but provides only the OneDrive cloud service. The high-end Office 365 Enterprise E5 bundle includes seven applications and seven cloud-based services. Progent can help your organization to select an Office 365 package that's right for your business, assist you to move from outdated editions of Office apps, and help you streamline the management of Office 365 and other network resources to build an efficient, secure and reliable IT environment.

Popular Office 365 Apps
The most obvious difference between Office 365 applications and their corresponding Microsoft Office releases is that Office 365 applications are rented instead of perpetually licensed. In addition, permanently licensed Office apps are allowed to be installed on just a single device at a time and are not updated automatically or upgraded at no extra cost when a major edition comes out. As an example, upgrading from Office Word 2013 to Word 2016 requires that you buy a whole new copy of Word. Minor releases of Office applications are provided Office 365 users sooner than to owners of perpetually licensed editions. Also, Office suites purchased with a perpetual license do not include the cloud services packaged with Office 365.

Client applications offered with various Office 365 subscription plans include:

Office 365 Word introduces the ability to write and view Office files across Microsoft Windows, Google Android, Mac, and iOS devices while maintaining a consistent look and feel. Users can also share documents, see which colleagues are editing various shared documents, and observe changes made by others in real time. As with Office 365 Excel and PowerPoint, you can instantly share without leaving your documents. Additionally, you can review who has permission to view or edit a specific document and who is now working on the document. For your own documents, you can easily change edit permissions. Learn about Progent's Office 365 Word consulting and training services.

Office 365 Excel now allows subscribers to employ the standard Exponential Smoothing (ETS) algorithm to build forecasts for projecting future trends based on historical data. New linked data types that are tied to current online sources include Stock and Geography. Stock retrieves the latest stock price, price change, and other equities data. The Geography data type allows you to select a country and extract current demographic or economic data such as population or gas price. As in the case of Office 365 Word and Office 365 PowerPoint, Office 365 Excel also can handle Scalable Vector Graphics (SVG) images. These images can be rotated, colored, and resized instantaneously without any loss in quality. Find out about Progent's Office 365 Excel consulting expertise.

Office 365 PowerPoint supports three dimensional models and provides an expanded library of animation effects such as swinging and turning. As with Office Excel and Office Word, Office 365 PowerPoint enables you to convert sketches into uniform shapes for flow charts, diagrams, and other objects. Office 365 PowerPoint for Mac includes the capability to embed and edit video from within PowerPoint. The Media Browser utility provides convenient access to a wide range of media sources like iPhoto galleries, iTunes playlists, and iMovie collections plus shapes, Clip Art, and other graphical content.

Office 365 Outlook offers important enhancements to previous releases of the Outlook email client application by adding useful features such as the focused Inbox, transparent downloading of OneDrive attachments, visibility of replies to a conference request for people other than meeting organizers, streamlined email organizing, plus more intuitive group creation and calendar sharing. Also, Office 365 Outlook users can hear their messages read aloud as the portions being read are visibly highlighted. Microsoft's Office intelligent services, when activated, allows Office 365 Outlook clients to dictate emails. Office 365 Outlook for Mac now supports push email, online archiving, the ability to propose a different meeting time in answer to a meeting request, and multiple calendar visibility. Full Screen Mode allows multiple open messages and permits subscribers to run two Outlook sessions in split-screen. Learn about Progent's Microsoft Office 365 Outlook and Outlook on the web configuration and troubleshooting services.

Office 365 OneNote for Windows 10 is included in the majority of Office 365 product bundles, installed by default in Windows 10, and offered for download as a no-cost mobile application. The older OneNote 2016 version, which includes features not at first provided in OneNote for Windows 10 such as Record Video, is still available at no cost but is no longer being updated. OneNote for Windows 10 introduces a new configurable look common for Windows 10, Apple Mac, iOS, Google Android, and Web. Other functionality available exclusively on OneNote for Windows 10 include improved ink-to-text capability, a notification center that indicates changes in open and recently used notebooks, automatic conversion of drawings into standardized shapes, and a virtual ruler to create straight lines and measure distance.

Office 365 Access, offered only on PCs, allows you to use VBA and a rich set of templates to automate business processes and build advanced forms and management reports. Office 365 Access comes with the connector library to integrate data from a broad range of leading business apps and data sources for creating quality reports from within the familiar Access environment. Support for storing Access data in both Microsoft SQL Server and Azure SQL gives you a world-class database plus SQL syntax for Access applications hosted either locally or in the Microsoft Azure cloud. Office Access 365 now comes with an improved Linked Table Manager, allows you to include new charts and reports, and enables you to link or extract data from Saleforce and Microsoft Dynamics 365. Find out about Progent's Microsoft Office 365 Access consulting expertise.

Office 365 Publisher, offered exclusively on PCs, is a leading do-your-own desktop publishing tool that takes advantage of the familiar Office environment to provide an easy-to-use program for developing and sharing modern-looking publications such as datasheets and newsletters that call for exact object placement. Since documents can be stored in the cloud, you can deliver a document as easily as providing a link. Publisher's wide use and ease of use make it possible to meet deadlines on time-critical jobs without needing rely on instant access to a desktop publishing specialist for implementing eleventh-hour edits.

Office 365 Cloud Services
Office 365 cloud services permit organizations to leverage Microsoft's vast cloud infrastructure to host mission-critical servers such as Microsoft Exchange, Teams and Skype for Business. This provides enterprise-class levels of reliability and security while saving the significant investment costs and management effort required for deploying and maintaining robust on-premises computer facilities. For cases that call for some servers to be located on-premises for compliance, throughput, or other reasons, the majority of Office 365 server platforms can be deployed with hybrid architectures that transparently support on-premises and cloud-based infrastructure.

Office 365 Exchange Online offers email hosting and allows mailbox sizes ranging from 50 Gbytes to whatever you can afford. Key features include custom domain addresses (name@​your­company​.com), shareable calendars and contacts, a web version of Outlook, single-click archiving, and easy creation of collaboration groups. The web-accessible Exchange admin center lets you manage email configurations for your company and gives you complete control over critical areas including user rights, cybersecurity, mail flow, making mailboxes and imposing limits, team work, address books, Voice mail, monitoring, and backup. Learn about Progent's Microsoft Office 365 Exchange Online configuration and management expertise.

Office 365 OneDrive is Microsoft's popular file sync and sharing service. Office 365 subscription plans usually come with 1 TB of OneDrive cloud storage, enabling you to save, access, and share data across Microsoft Windows, Apple Mac, or iOS and Android smartphones and tablets. By automatically syncing your files to your work station, OneDrive lets you revise documents even when you are offline. OneDrive facilitates sharing and collaboration, tracking all file updates to help prevent consistency issues. You can start a co-authoring project on any computer and switch smoothly to another computer at your convenience. For enhanced collaboration, an array of utilities permit you to annotate and highlight documents. Advanced discovery features enable you to find files fast, and tracking tools offer useful information such as how many people accessed or shared a file.

Office 365 Skype for Business Online offers cloud-based voice, HD video, and conferencing. Online Plan 1 includes instant messaging, real-time presence, peer-to-peer VoIP, and HD video, plus Skype Connectivity. Online Plan 2 includes scheduled and on-demand conferencing with A/V calling as well as screen and application sharing on iOS and Google Android smartphones and tablets, Windows PCs, and Apple Mac computers. For hybrid environments that integrate a local Skype for Business Server with Skype for Business Online cloud services, you can create a seamless solution via a Split Domain implementation. Find out about Progent's Microsoft Office 365 Skype for Business planning and integration expertise.

Office 365 SharePoint Online combines content management with internal web publishing to enable organizations to broadcast and share content and to promote collaboration. SharePoint's admin center has been enhanced with usage reports, Message Center updates, and a Service Health dashboard intended to simplify administrative tasks. In addition, you can now connect up-to-date SharePoint team sites to Office 365 Groups, expanding your existing SharePoint sites with group conversations, calendar, and Planner. Features to support cloud integration now include hybrid taxonomy and auditing as well as an updated development model for creating SharePoint solutions locally, in hybrid implementations, and in Microsoft Office 365. Find out about Progent's Office 365 SharePoint Online configuration and development services.

Microsoft Office Teams is the future of Skype for Business, providing a unified portal for conversations, contacts, and information with persistent chat, file sharing, and built-in voice and video conferencing. Microsoft has enhanced the cloud architecture that hosts Teams so it can provide quicker conference join times than Skype and to enable integration with Cognitive Services such as text-to-voice, language translation, speech recognition, and machine learning. Progent's consultants can help you to try out Microsoft Office 365 Teams to evaluate the benefits of adopting this new communication technology. Find out about Progent's Microsoft Teams migration consulting.

Office 365 Yammer is a social network platform designed to be used inside an organization and restricted to clients with an authorized corporate email address. Postings can be files, links, media, PowerPoint presentations, and SharePoint content. The Discovery feed helps you find information that relates to your job or concerns as shown by the groups you have joined, discussions you follow, and people you interact with. You can locate discussions, files, groups, participants, and other items associated with a given co-worker. Group Insights inform you how activities like publishing, viewing, and liking are trending historically. Notifications alert you about relevant activity such as new postings in your groups, comments in your conversations, and new participants.

Office 365 Power BI is a stack of online services compatible with Office 365 that enables businesses to build and share dashboards and custom reports that provide up-to-date insights into vital areas of your business. Office 365 Power BI dashboards can aggregate information from a broad array of internal and external sources such as Excel, on-premises SQL Server Analysis Service, Azure, or popular sources such as Zendesk, Google Analytics and Salesforce. Dashboards and reports created by Power BI can be updated continually via data streaming. You can save and share your visualizations in the cloud with OneDrive. Power BI Online mobile apps are available for Windows computers plus iOS and Android smartphones. Find out about Progent's Microsoft Office 365 Power BI Online design and development consulting services.

How Progent's Consultants Can Assist You with Microsoft Office 365 Solutions
For organizations who need fast remote help from a top-tier Office 365 integration consultant, Progent can provide a full range of services including system design, deployment, troubleshooting, application development, management, and training. Progent's Microsoft-qualified support consultants, Cisco-certified network infrastructure engineers, macOS and OS X technology consultants, iPhone and iPad experts and Android smartphone consultants can help you to enhance your information network with Office 365 products and services.

ProSight Remote Management and Monitoring (RMM) Services
Progent provides a family of affordable, flat-rate managed services designed to allow small and medium-size organizations to benefit from the same advanced technology used by many of the world's leading corporations. Progent's ProSight line of network monitoring and management services covers all key facets of information technology such as email protection, security and compliance, cloud-based backup and disaster recovery, network infrastructure monitoring and management, virtual server cloud hosting, and network resources documentation management. Learn more about Progent's remote management and monitoring services.

Get in Touch with Progent for Office 365 Expertise
If you are trying to find an Office 365 consultant, call Progent at 800-993-9400 or visit Contact Progent.

Cloud Integration Solutions from Progent
The options available for public cloud products and services are increasing continually, making it hard for information system managers to select the right cloud solution for their organization. Progent has in-depth experience helping companies ranging from startups to large enterprises to design, implement, and manage hybrid environments that combine various cloud products and services from major public clouds. Progent's cloud integration consultants can assist you to assess the relative benefits and pitfalls of different public cloud options and can help you create a cloud-based or hybrid ecosystem that delivers maximum competitive value.

Public cloud products supported by Progent include:

Progent's Microsoft Azure cloud planning and integration experts can assist you with every aspect of Microsoft Azure migration including needs analysis, prerequisites assessment, solution design, pilot testing, implementation, automated management, performance tuning, license management, disaster recovery strategies, security planning, and compliance assessment. Progent can help your IT staff to set up and debug firewall appliances and VPN connections so your users can securely connect to Azure resources, and Progent's Microsoft-certified consulting experts can assist you set up critical Microsoft technologies to run in Azure including Windows Server, Exchange, SQL and SharePoint. Progent can also assist your organization to set up a hybrid ecosystem that transparently combines physical datacenters with Azure-based services.

Microsoft supports seamless hybrid environments that integrate Office 365 and on-premises Exchange. This allows you to have certain mailboxes hosted on your corporate datacenter or private cloud and other mailboxes hosted by Office 365. Progent's certified Exchange consultants can help you with any facet of designing, implementing and troubleshooting your hybrid Office 365/Exchange network. Progent's Exchange specialists can provide as-needed support to help you through stubborn technical bottlenecks and also offer extensive project management outsourcing or co-sourcing to ensure your hybrid Office 365/Exchange solution is successfully completed on schedule and on budget. To learn more about Progent's consulting support for integrating Office 365 and on-premises Exchange environments, refer to Exchange Online integration solutions with on-premises Exchange.

Progent's Amazon AWS integration experts can provide cost-effective remote support to help companies to integrate Amazon AWS cloud services including Amazon EC2 for virtual server hosting, Amazon S3 for expandable high-performance storage, and Glacier for value-priced archival storage. Progent can help your IT team with every phase of Amazon AWS integration including needs analysis, readiness assessment, architectural design, testing, deployment, centralized administration, performance tuning, software license management, backup/restore solutions, and security. Progent can provide advanced expertise with firewall configuration and VPN connections and can show you how to create cloud-based or hybrid ecosystems that efficiently integrate Amazon AWS services. Progent can provide occasional support or Progent can deliver comprehensive project management outsourcing to help you move smoothly to the Amazon AWS cloud platform.

Amazon Marketplace Web Service is a collection of APIs that enables Amazon sellers to improve the efficiency of their operations by automating crucial sales functions including listings, orders, shipments, fulfillment, and reports. By leveraging Amazon's extensive online ecosystem and automating their sales processes, vendors can broaden their market, reduce their cost of sales, accelerate reaction time to customers, and increase their bottom line. Progent's Amazon Marketplace Web Service (Amazon MWS) developers can work with your development staff and provide application programming, workflow integration, project management support, and mentoring to help you shorten development time and costs and speed up your return on investment.

Progent's Google Cloud Platform planning and integration consultants can provide affordable online and onsite consulting to help organizations of any size to migrate all or part of their core IT resources to Google Cloud Platform (GCP). This can save time and equipment costs and allow the use of Google's state-of-the-art machine learning tools. Progent can help you with every aspect of Google Cloud Platform migration and troubleshooting including needs analysis, preparedness assessment, system design, testing, deployment, centralized administration, performance optimization, licensing management, backup/restore solutions, and security strategies.