Since its launch in June 2011, Office 365 has gone through many changes. For example, its look and feel was significantly upgraded, so it looks more like Office 2013. Office 365 has also simplified the application and approval process for nonprofits to access their free plans. You may have also seen that Skydrive is now called Onedrive, and now Office is being offered online. These are just a few of many changes, and there will be more in the future. For now, I would like to share some key changes that could be useful for your organization.
1. Office 365 offers you Exchange Online protection anti-spam filtering solution as part of the nonprofit plan.
2. Exchange public folders have returned. If you liked to use mail-enabled public folders to communicate with your team, you will be happy to know they are back!
3. Office 365 offers a mail encryption tool. This is included on the enterprise plans, and can be purchased as an add-on for other plans at $2 per user.
4. You can provide your users with the same network password by using Office 365 password sync tool. There is no need to federate your domain with Office 365 servers to emulate single sign on!
Note: Password Sync is a feature of the Windows Azure Active Directory Sync tool that synchronizes user passwords from your on-premises Microsoft domain to Windows Azure. This feature enables your users to log into Office 365 using the same password as they use to log into your on-premises network. This feature does not provide a Single Sign-On solution because there is no token exchanged associated with password sync process.
5. Microsoft just released Multi-Factor Authentication (MFA) for most of their Office 365 plans, including the nonprofit plans. With MFA, Office 365 users are required to verify their identity by accepting a phone call, text message or app notification on their smartphones after entering their correct passwords. Users can then sign n after they have successful completed this step.
Microsoft continues to make an effort to improve Office 365 and its offerings. We will continue to inform you about these updates. Questions? Feel free to comment below.
For guidance on whether Office 365 is right for your organization, and for help implementing it, please contact us using the form at the right.