Overview of Office 365
Office 365 is Microsoft's cloud-based service offered to companies for end-user services such as Exchange, SharePoint, and Lync. It is constantly evolving, so the information I give in this chapter might get outdated quite soon.
Let's take a quick look at Office 365 as it looks today:
There are three main services being offered to customers at the moment, namely:
E-mail services using Exchange Online
Collaboration services using SharePoint Online
Online chat and conferencing using Lync Online
It is very easy to start using these services, so long as you do not have an existing environment that you want to interoperate with.
If some of your users are using Office 365, but are still also using an on-premises solution, it gets a bit trickier.
Note
From the end-user perspective, the best solution, in my opinion, is to configure Federation as soon as users are to exist in both Office 365 and on-premises.
If you have an existing environment and would like to start using Office 365...