Microsoft provides different versions of its Office suite, which differ in the applications they include and are designed so that customers can buy only the applications that they need. Office has a few versions of its suite:

• Office Home & Student
• Office Home & Business
• Office Standard
• Office Professional
• Office Professional Plus
• Office Professional Academic

Each version of Office includes the following programs, products, and features:

The previous table is referencing Office 2010 since it is the last version of the Office suite, before the cloud versions complicated things. Office, the non-cloud version, is purchased via a one-time fee of between $60 to ~$400 retail. When I say one-time, I mean one-time until you need to upgrade.

Conversely, Office 365 comes in a lot more versions than Office and, rather than paying a one-time price at retail or volume cost, you lease the software by paying a small sum monthly or annually. Office 365 can be Office only, Office with other products, or no Office included whatsoever.

The main versions of Office 365 are as follows:

• Consumer versions:
  • Home
  • Personal
  • Home & Student
• Commercial/business versions:
  • Business
  • Business Essentials
  • Business Premium
  • Pro Plus
  • Enterprise E1
  • Enterprise E3
  • Enterprise E5

Those are the core ones, but there are more versions for government, non-profit, and academic use, but they are very similar to the Business through E3 versions, aside from the cost and a few other particulars.

In Chapter 2, Understanding More about Office 365, we will discuss licensing in more detail. Just note that in this book, we will cover the Business version of Office 365.

Office 365 subscriptions vary, but the following are the services in Office 365 for most plans. There are more services than what I have listed here, and each of these services can be assigned to users individually with some exceptions. For more details, see the Business plans at https://products.office.com/en-us/compare-all-microsoft-office-products?tab=2 and the Enterprise plans at https://products.office.com/en-us/business/compare-more-office-365-for-business-plans.

This is the engine behind Outlook. It supplies you with email, calendar, contacts, tasks, journaling, and notes capabilities. This portion of Office 365 gives an enterprise-grade, professional email with 50 GB of space using your company's custom domain. You also get the ability to share calendars with others in your organization. Exchange is included with the Business Essentials, Business Premium, E1, E3, and E5 plans. If you have an E3 or E5 plan, you will get a 100 GB mailbox with unlimited archiving.

This application started as Lync in the first release of Office 365 and is different than Skype, which is the consumer service. With this service, each user has their own account where they can see the presence of people in their personal list and have the ability to instant message and schedule or initiate impromptu online meetings with audio or HD video conferencing for up to 250 participants. No more sharing meeting accounts! It also allows the host(s) to share surveys, polls, and whiteboards with the attendees, and attendees as well as the host(s) can share a meeting notebook or take notes on an individual basis via OneNote integration. Invited attendees do not have to have the Skype for Business application to participate in the meeting.

Skype for Business is included with the Business Essentials, Business Premium, E1, E3, and E5 plans, and were initiated after around 24 August 2018. Any plan initiated after this date will only have Microsoft Teams available, as Teams is replacing Skype for Business in purely cloud Office 365 tenants. Your organization will still have the ability to have a Skype for Business server on premises if desired and if the appropriate additional server (not Office 365) licenses are purchased and deployed. If you have an E5 plan, you may also get a phone number assigned to you from this service and have the ability to dial out and receive calls via this application.

Microsoft Teams is one of Microsoft's newest services and a direct competitive service to Slack. It is a real-time and persistent collaborative work space that's easy to quickly set up and integrates instant messaging, meeting, notes capabilities, and file management, as well as the ability to easily integrate in other Microsoft and third-party apps. This service gives teams of people, internal and external, the ability to have their own work space and collaborate on a single source of truth.

In organizations with purely cloud implementations of Office 365, users with Skype for Business and Microsoft Teams will eventually be migrated to Microsoft Teams only. Microsoft Teams is included with the Business Essentials, Business Premium, E1, E3, and E5 plans. If you have an E5 plan, you may also get a phone number assigned to you from this service and have the ability to dial out and receive calls via this application.

SharePoint is Microsoft's original collaborative work space and has been around even before its initial release as SharePoint in 28 March 2001. SharePoint was added as a service to Office 365 and renamed SharePoint Online. Since then, it has evolved into its own evergreen version during the life of SharePoint 2013 and on a life of its own, widely diverging its capabilities from the SharePoint on-premises versions of 2013, 2016, and 2019. Still, SharePoint Online has capabilities above and beyond those offered by Microsoft Teams and is the backbone for Microsoft Teams. This service gives you the ability to share documents and manage projects, like Microsoft Teams, but also to create online forms, dashboards, automated workflow, and much more.

In SharePoint, your organization starts off with 1 TB of storage space, which can be upgraded to as large as 25 TB. SharePoint Online is included with the Business Essentials, Business Premium, E1, E3, and E5 plans.

This application started in Office 365 as SkyDrive for Business and is not the same as OneDrive, which is the consumer service. OneDrive for Business gives you your very own 1 TB of business file storage that can be synced with PC, Mac, and/or mobile devices. You have the ability to easily create and share files with internal and external people (depending on configuration) and control who can see and/or edit the shared documents. OneDrive for Business is included with the Business, Business Essentials, Business Premium, Pro Plus, E1, E3, and E5 plans.

Plans offering gives you either licenses for Office Professional or Office Professional Plus. Each user with this license will have the ability to download Office on up to five mobile devices and five PCs/Macs. Office Professional Plus includes Outlook, Word, PowerPoint, Excel, Publisher, Access, Excel, and OneNote, and Professional offers all of these except Publisher. The version of Office in Office 365 is evergreen, much like SharePoint Online. InfoPath, which has been a part of Office Pro Plus since Office 2003, has been removed from the Office suite, but is still available for download separately via the Office 365 downloads. Office Pro is included in Business and Business Premium plans, and Office Pro Plus is included in Pro Plus and in all Enterprise plans.

The web app and mobile app versions of Office give you the ability to create, access, edit, and share Word, Excel, PowerPoint, and OneNote files through OneDrive for Business, SharePoint, and Microsoft Teams. You also get the ability to co-author documents with those who have edit access. Co-authoring is the ability to open and work on a document simultaneously with others. Office web and mobile apps are included in the Pro Plus plan, as well as all Business and Enterprise plans except E1. For E1, only the web apps are available.

In addition, Office 365 is security-hardened and compliant with a plethora of government and industry standards in the US and abroad. Your data is your data and it says private to you and your organization, and your organization has the ability to see where the data is and who has access to it. There are more measures and capabilities than what I have outlined here. You can read all of the details on Microsoft's privacy, compliance, security, and transparency measures via the Microsoft Trust Center: http://trustoffice365.com.

You need to log into Office 365 to use all of its features. Once you have an Office 365 account, you can login using the following steps:

1. Go to https://www.office.com/ and click the Sign In button:

2. You will be taken to a page similar to the following, where you can enter your email address for your account and then your password:

3. If you have logged in with different accounts before, you will see something similar to the following screen. Choose an account:

You can go directly to the sign-in page by going to https://portal.office.com instead of https://www.office.com/.

Now, let's look at the different browsers that you can use for Microsoft Office.

Microsoft says that Office 365 works on all popular, up-to-date browsers, which is true, but not all work well. Here is the ranking from best to worse:

• Internet Explorer 11 (IE11): This Microsoft browser is still the best for all features and functionalities of Office 365 and SharePoint. I realize that this browser is decrepit and mostly useless for anything else but this.

The first three browsers offer most of the features and functionality of Office 365 and SharePoint:

• Edge: Microsoft's newest browser, which was meant to eventually replace IE. The word on the street is that Edge should replace IE soon but, at the time of writing this book, there is no anticipated date.
• Firefox: This browser can actually work better than Internet Explorer in one regard: it can be easier to move things around in SharePoint when designing at times because it was designed for web development.
• Safari: This is the browser for Mac. On Mac, the user can get Firefox but not IE.
• Chrome: This browser, by Google, is a hugely popular one, but in the case of Office 365 and SharePoint, you should make this browser your last choice. Google does not readily share browser code changes with Microsoft, and those changes can happen at the drop of a hat and usually without warning. You could literally leave your desk for a few minutes or even go from one page to another and suddenly the screens may look different, have things missing, and/or look broken. The sudden code changes cause problems with SharePoint and Office 365.
  Things could be different and, if you are not intimately aware of the environment, you may not even realize that you are missing possible valuable pieces of information. Due to this possible sudden issue, I highly advise you to use Chrome for everything else for Office 365 and SharePoint. If you do use Chrome for SharePoint and Office 365, note that you will be doing so at your own possible peril.
  I would even go as far as to highly recommend that you set your default browser to any of the other browsers because some of my clients have had trouble launching Skype for Business meetings when clicking on the Join Skype Meeting link (and this may also be the case for Teams meetings). When the link is clicked, the user is first taken to the browser while the full Skype for Business or Teams application is searched for. If the application is not found, the user is offered the ability to use the web app version. The browser that's used when the meeting link is clicked is the default browser.