Cloud Integration Services

Office 365 is Microsoft's expanding line of productivity software and cloud services available on a subscription basis. Office 365 apps and cloud services are offered in a variety of packages, called subscription plans, intended for markets ranging from individual and households to major corporations.

The most popular Microsoft Office 365 titles can be installed on multiple devices including Windows PCs, Apple Macs, iPads, and smartphones. Multi-device applications include versions of Word, Excel, PowerPoint, OneNote and Outlook. PC-only applications include Access and Office Publisher. To accommodate customers who have multiple computing devices, many bundles allow you to put Office applications on more than one device. For example, Office 365 Business and ProPlus packages allow each Office application to be run on as many as five customer devices.

Progent offers fast and affordable remote access to a support consultant with expert knowledge of Microsoft, Mac, iOS, and Google Android technology. Progent can help you to evaluate the numerous subscription plans offered with Office 365 and integrate your information network with Office 365 so it delivers maximum business value. Progent can help you manage cross-platform networks that incorporate Microsoft Windows, Apple macOS or OS X, and Linux based products. Progent can also assist you to deploy and maintain hybrid networks that transparently integrate on-premises and cloud infrastructure.

Microsoft Office 365 Apps and Cloud-based Services
Office 365 packages are available to serve a wide selection of markets such as businesses of all sizes, schools, state and local government, and home. Some packages, such as Office 365 Business Essentials, includes no applications but only cloud services. Other plans, like Office 365 Business, offers applications but provides only the OneDrive cloud service. The top-of-the-line Office 365 Enterprise E5 subscription plan includes seven applications and seven cloud services. Progent's consultants can help your organization to pick an Office 365 bundle that's right for your business, assist you to move from outdated editions of Office applications, and show you how to unify the management of Office 365 and other system resources to create an efficient, protected and reliable IT ecosystem.

Popular Office 365 Apps
The most obvious distinction between Office 365 apps and their related Office versions is that Office 365 apps are subscription based rather than perpetually licensed. In addition, permanently licensed Microsoft Office applications are supposed to be installed on just one PC or Mac and are not updated automatically or upgraded for free when a major new edition is released. As an example, upgrading from Office Word 2013 to Word 2016 requires you to purchase another copy of Word. Minor updates to Microsoft Office applications are made available to Office 365 subscribers faster than to users of perpetually licensed versions. Also, Office suites purchased with a perpetual license do not include the Azure-based services included with Office 365.

Applications available with various Office 365 bundles include:

Office 365 Word offers the ability to write and view Office documents across Microsoft Windows, Android, Mac, and iOS computers while presenting a common look and feel. Users can also share documents, find out which colleagues are editing shared documents, and observe updates made by team members as they happen. Just as with Office 365 Excel and PowerPoint, you can easily share from within your documents. Additionally, you can check who has permission to access a given document and who is currently working on it. For documents you own, you can quickly modify edit permissions. Find out about Progent's Microsoft Office 365 Word consulting expertise.

Office 365 Excel permits subscribers to employ the standard Exponential Smoothing algorithm to build forecast charts for projecting future trends based on past data. New linked data types that are tied to online databases include Stock and Geography. Stock retrieves the latest stock price, price change, and other stock market information. The Geography data type enables you to select a region and retrieve current demographic or economic information like population or gas costs. As in the case of Office 365 Word and PowerPoint, Office 365 Excel also supports Scalable Vector Graphics images. These images can be turned, colored, and resized instantly without any deterioration in quality. Find out about Progent's Microsoft Office 365 Excel consulting services.

Office 365 PowerPoint supports 3D objects and includes an expanded library of animation functions like swinging and turning. Like Microsoft Office Excel and Office Word, Office 365 PowerPoint allows you to convert drawings into standard shapes for charts, diagrams, and various other objects. Office 365 PowerPoint for Mac includes the ability to incorporate and edit movies from inside PowerPoint. The Media Browser utility provides convenient access to a wide range of media sources including iPhoto galleries, iTunes playlists, and iMovie libraries as well as shapes, Clip Art, and other graphics.

Office 365 Outlook offers important enhancements to prior releases of the Outlook email and calendar application by introducing features like the focused Inbox, automatic downloading of OneDrive attachments, visibility of responses to a meeting request for people who are not meeting organizers, streamlined email sorting, plus easier group creation and calendar sharing. Additionally, Office 365 Outlook subscribers can hear their messages read aloud as the segments being read are visibly highlighted. Microsoft's Office intelligent services, when enabled, also allows Office 365 Outlook subscribers to dictate messages. Office 365 Outlook for Mac includes push email, online archiving, the ability to propose a different meeting schedule in answer to a meeting request, and multiple calendar visibility. Full Screen Mode permits multiple open emails and enables subscribers to run two Outlook instances in split-screen. Learn about Progent's Office 365 Outlook and Outlook on the web consulting and training services.

Office 365 OneNote for Windows 10 is included in the majority of Office 365 product bundles, pre-installed in Windows 10, and available for download as a free mobile app. The older OneNote 2016 version, which includes features not at first available in OneNote for Windows 10 likes Record Video, is still available at no cost but is no longer being updated. OneNote for Windows 10 introduces a new customizable look common across Windows 10, Apple Mac, iOS, Android, and Web. Other features available exclusively on OneNote for Windows 10 include improved ink-to-text capability, an alert center that shows changes in your open and recent notebooks, automatic conversion of drawings into standardized shapes, and a virtual ruler to create straight lines and make measurements.

Office 365 Access, offered only on PCs, allows you to utilize VBA and an extensive library of templates to streamline business operations and build advanced forms and management reports. Office 365 Access comes with the connector library to integrate data from a broad selection of leading business applications and data sources for generating quality reports from within the familiar Access environment. Support for storing Access data in both Microsoft SQL Server as well as Microsoft Azure SQL provides a world-class database plus SQL syntax for Access applications hosted either on premises or in the Microsoft Azure cloud. Microsoft Office Access 365 now includes an updated Linked Table Manager, allows you to include a wealth of new forms and management reports, and enables you to link or import data from Saleforce and Dynamics 365. Learn about Progent's Office 365 Access consulting expertise.

Office 365 Publisher, offered only on Windows PCs, is a popular entry-level desktop publishing system that leverages the familiar Office environment to deliver an easy-to-use program for developing and sharing professional-looking documents such as mailers and white papers that call for exact image placement. Because publications can be saved to the cloud, you can distribute a document simply by sending a link. Publisher's wide use and simplicity make it possible to meet deadlines on time-critical projects without having to depend on instant access to a desktop publishing professional for implementing eleventh-hour edits.

Office 365 Cloud Services
Office 365 cloud services permit organizations to leverage Microsoft's extensive cloud resources to host mission-critical servers like Exchange, Teams and Skype for Business. These services provide high levels of reliability and protection while reducing the substantial upfront expense and management effort required for deploying and maintaining complex local datacenters. For situations that call for some servers to be kept on-premises for compliance, throughput, or other reasons, most Office 365 virtual server products can be implemented using hybrid architectures that seamlessly combine local and cloud-hosted infrastructure.

Office 365 Exchange Online offers email hosting and supports mailbox sizes ranging from 50 Gbytes to whatever you can afford. Key features include custom domain addresses (name@​your­company​.com), shared calendars and contacts, a web version of Outlook, one-click archiving, and simple-to-create collaboration groups. The web-accessible Exchange admin center allows you to control email settings for your company and gives you full control over crucial areas such as user rights, security and compliance, mail flow, creating mailboxes and defining limits, collaboration, address books, Unified Messaging, monitoring, and backup. Learn about Progent's Office 365 Exchange Online configuration and management expertise.

Office 365 OneDrive is Microsoft's popular file synchronization and sharing service. Office 365 subscription plans usually come with 1 TB of OneDrive cloud storage, allowing you to store, retrieve, and share files across Windows, Apple Mac, or iOS and Android smartphones and tablets. By transparently synchronizing your files to your work station, OneDrive allows you to modify documents even when you are offline. OneDrive simplifies sharing and collaboration, keeping track all file updates to prevent inconsistency issues. You can start a co-authoring project on any device and switch smoothly to a different device at your convenience. For advanced collaboration, a variety of utilities permit you to annotate and highlight shared documents. Advanced search tools enable you to locate files fast, and analysis tools provide insights such as the number of people who saw or shared a document.

Office 365 Skype for Business Online provides cloud-based IP voice, video, and conferencing. Online Plan 1 includes IM, real-time presence, peer-to-peer VoIP, and video calling, plus Skype Connectivity. Online Plan 2 includes scheduled and on-demand conferencing with audio and video calling as well as screen and application sharing on Apple iOS and Android devices, PCs, and Mac computers. For hybrid environments that integrate an on-premises Skype for Business Server with Skype for Business Online services, you can deploy a cohesive environment using a Split Domain implementation. Find out about Progent's Office 365 Skype for Business solution design and configuration consulting.

Office 365 SharePoint Online integrates content management with internal web publishing to allow organizations to distribute and share content and to promote teamwork. The SharePoint admin center has been enhanced with interactive usage analysis, Message Center updates, and a Service Health dashboard intended to streamline management. Also, you can link up-to-date team sites to Microsoft Office 365 Groups, expanding your existing SharePoint sites with shared conversations, calendar, and project planning. Features to support cloud coexistence now include hybrid taxonomy and hybrid auditing as well as an enhanced development architecture for creating SharePoint solutions on-premises, in hybrid deployments, and in Office 365. Find out about Progent's Microsoft Office 365 SharePoint Online integration and development services.

Microsoft Office Teams is the future of Skype for Business, providing a unified portal for meetings, contact lists, and information with persistent chat, file sharing, and built-in IP voice and video conferencing. Microsoft has designed the cloud architecture that hosts Teams so it can deliver quicker meeting join speeds than Skype for Business and to allow integration with Microsoft Cognitive Services such as text-to-voice, translation, speech recognition, and AI. Progent's consultants can help you to try out Microsoft Office 365 Teams to evaluate the benefits of migrating to this next-generation collaboration technology. Learn more about Progent's Microsoft Teams solution design expertise.

Office 365 Yammer is a social network platform intended to be used inside an organization and restricted to users with a valid corporate email address. Postings can be files, links, media, PowerPoint shows, and SharePoint pages. The Discovery connection makes it easy to locate information relevant to your job or interests as indicated by the groups you belong to, conversations you follow, and people you communicate with. You can find conversations, files, groups, participants, and other information related to a specific colleague. Group Insights inform you how events like posting, viewing, and liking are trending over time. Notifications tell 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 integrated with Microsoft Office 365 that enables businesses to build sharable dashboards and on-demand reports that offer up-to-date consolidated views into key areas of your business. Microsoft Office 365 Power BI dashboards can aggregate information from a broad array of internal and external sources such as Microsoft Excel, on-premises SQL Server Analysis Service, the Azure cloud, or popular databases like QuickBooks, Google Analytics and Salesforce. Dashboards and reports developed on Power BI can be refreshed in real time via data streaming. You can save and distribute your visualizations in the cloud with Office 365 OneDrive. Native Power BI Online mobile applications are available for Windows computers as well as Apple iOS and Google Android smartphones. Find out about Progent's Microsoft Office 365 Power BI Online integration expertise.

How Progent's Consultants Can Assist Your Business with Microsoft Office 365 Integration
For organizations looking for fast remote help from a top-tier Office 365 configuration expert, Progent offers a full sele3ction of services such as solution architecture design, deployment, troubleshooting, software development, administration, and education. Progent's Microsoft-certified support consultants, Cisco-certified network experts, macOS and OS X technology consultants, iPhone and iPad consultants and Android consultants can help you to integrate your network with Office 365 products and services.

ProSight Remote Management and Monitoring Services
Progent provides a family of budget-friendly, fixed-price managed services designed to enable small and mid-size businesses to utilize the same advanced technology deployed by some of the industry's top corporations. Progent's ProSight series of network management outsourcing services addresses all critical areas of modern networking including email protection, security and compliance, cloud-based backup and disaster recovery, network infrastructure monitoring and management, VM hosting, and network asset documentation management. Learn more about Progent's remote management and monitoring services.

Contact 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.

Public Cloud Integration Services from Progent
The options available for public cloud products and services are increasing rapidly, making it hard for IT managers to determine the right cloud solution for their organization. Progent has worked extensively assisting companies ranging from startups to large enterprises to plan, deploy, and maintain hybrid environments that combine various cloud services from leading public clouds. Progent's cloud integration experts can assist you to understand the relative benefits and pitfalls of different public cloud options and can help you build a cloud-based or hybrid network that provides maximum competitive value.

Public cloud products supported by Progent include:

Progent's Microsoft Azure planning and integration consultants can assist you with every phase of Microsoft Azure integration such as requirements definition, prerequisites evaluation, system design, pilot testing, implementation, automated administration, performance tuning, license management, disaster recovery preparedness, security planning, and compliance assessment. Progent can assist you to configure and debug firewall appliances and VPN connections so that your users can securely connect to Azure-based resources, and Progent's Microsoft-certified consulting experts can help you set up critical Microsoft technologies to run in the cloud including Windows Server, Exchange Server, SQL and Skype for Business. Progent can also assist your organization to create a hybrid ecosystem that transparently combines physical datacenters with Azure resources.

Microsoft supports seamless hybrid ecosystems that combine Office 365 Exchange Online and local Exchange. This allows you to have some mailboxes located on your on-premises datacenter and other mailboxes resident on Office 365. Progent's Microsoft-certified consulting team can assist your organization with any phase of planning, integrating and troubleshooting your hybrid Exchange network. Progent's Exchange consultants can provide occasional expertise to help you resolve stubborn technical problems and also offer extensive project management outsourcing or co-sourcing to make sure your hybrid Office 365/Exchange solution is successfully completed on time and within budget. To learn more about Progent's consulting support for integrating Office 365 and on-premises Exchange environments, go to Exchange Online integration with on-premises Exchange.

Progent's Amazon AWS integration experts offer cost-effective online consulting to assist businesses to integrate Amazon Web Services (AWS) cloud services such as Amazon EC2 for virtual server hosting, Amazon S3 for scalable low-latency storage, and Glacier for low-cost archival storage. Progent can help your IT team with every phase of Amazon AWS migration and troubleshooting including needs analysis, preparedness evaluation, architectural design and review, pilot testing, deployment, administration, performance optimization, licensing management, disaster recovery mechanisms, and security and compliance. Progent can provide advanced expertise with firewalls and VPN access and can show you how to deploy all-cloud or hybrid ecosystems that efficiently integrate Amazon AWS services. Progent offers as-needed consulting or Progent can provide project management outsourcing to help you migrate efficiently to the Amazon AWS cloud platform.

Amazon Marketplace Web Service is an integrated library of APIs that enables Amazon sellers to improve the efficiency of their business processes by automating crucial sales functions such as listings, orders, shipments, fulfillment, and reports. By leveraging Amazon's vast online ecosystem and automating their sales, vendors can broaden their reach, reduce their cost of sales, accelerate reaction time to customers, and increase their bottom line. Progent's Amazon Marketplace Web Service developers can collaborate with your development team and provide application programming, workflow integration, project management support, and mentoring so you can cut development time and costs and expedite your ROI.

Progent's Google Cloud Platform integration experts can provide cost-effective online and on-premises support to help companies of any size to migrate all or part of their core IT resources to Google Cloud Platform services. This can save management hassle and equipment costs and enable the use of Google's cutting edge AI and machine learning tools. Progent can assist your IT team with every phase of Google Cloud Platform migration and troubleshooting including requirements analysis, preparedness assessment, system design, pilot testing, deployment, centralized administration, performance optimization, software license management, disaster recovery solutions, and security strategies.