What are Microsoft Office 365 Exchange Online E-Mail Services, and Why Would I Want Them?
Email, calendaring, and communications management are integral parts of today’s business. It makes sense to leverage enterprise-class scale, features, and reliability for your organization’s critical email services, while also being ready for future needs and ease-of-use integration with an ecosystem of file sharing, collaboration, and cloud applications. Aldridge uses and recommends the Microsoft Office 365 suite of cloud-based solutions and the Microsoft Exchange Online service for your organization’s email.
Behind the scenes, many organizations used to operate independent email servers at their offices. Many of these were based on Microsoft Exchange, the same original engine Microsoft Office 365 uses today. Other organizations may have grown up using other online email services, but are now ready to overcome email capacity, feature, or integration limits. Today, there are very few cases where it makes economic sense to operate a core utility like email on expensive server infrastructure. Most clients we work with have adopted Microsoft Office 365 as their go-to communications platform, protected by Microsoft’s infrastructure and global data center network.
Using a cloud-based backend email server like Microsoft Exchange Online doesn’t substantially change your everyday desktop experience. You can still install and use the full Microsoft Outlook application on your phone, desktop, laptops, and other devices as you always have.
Leveraging Microsoft Office 365 for your email services eliminates or avoids email system dependencies on your physical office. Your email services continue to function unattended and are available for your use from any location you have an internet connection.
We’ve helped hundreds of organizations complete their email service migration to Microsoft Office 365 and administer and support the environment for our clients and their staff every day.
Microsoft Office 365 Exchange Online E-Mail Services FAQs
Will the Microsoft Outlook email application we use today need to change once we switch to Microsoft Office 365 for our email?
No. Versions of Microsoft Outlook released within the last five years are usually current enough to work with Microsoft’s latest generation of cloud services for email. Microsoft Outlook will still work, look, and feel as it has.
A best practice is installing the Microsoft Office application suite licensed from your organization’s Microsoft Office 365 subscription. Not only does this keep your organization on the most current version of the Microsoft Office application suite, but it will also stay updated as part of your subscription. You will receive new version updates and feature refinements automatically going forward. In addition, the current Microsoft Office application suite has the tightest integration with the online, collaboration, and web technologies you expect to see in a modern application.
Some configuration choices and personal preferences you and your organization may have individually set in your own Microsoft Outlook environments may change as part of your migration. We work to configure your environment to achieve your business and individual goals in ways that are consistent with our experience for best practices for how Microsoft Outlook and Microsoft Office 365 can work best together.
Do mobile users have to use the Microsoft Outlook mobile application? Can they use their phone’s native email client?
As a best practice, we recommend everyone install and use the Microsoft Outlook app from your phone’s app store. It’s free and included with your organization’s Microsoft Office 365 subscription. Having everyone use the Microsoft Outlook app on their smartphones will give them the best, most secure, consistent experience.