Skype for Business

Achieve More with a Fully Integrated Communication Solution

We believe that the heart of productivity is great teamwork, and the heart of great teams is great communication.

Productivity today is centered on conversations – sometimes a quick instant message or call, and sometimes a meeting planned in advance including voice, video and content sharing. Office 365 is a world-class productivity service that helps great teams to accomplish great achievements.

At the heart of Office 365 communications is the Skype for Business service connecting your teams with the experience they love, in the Office applications they use every day. With Skype for Business you can simplify your infrastructure with one platform for calling, conferencing, video, and sharing.

Our company offers a fully integrated communications solution based on Office 365, our services, and certified hardware to ensure the best experience for your end-users. We help our customers along all the steps of the productivity improvement journey, starting with deployment planning and roll-out, to making sure your teams are up to speed with the new solution and comfortable enough with the new ways of communication. By leveraging our company’s offering, your teams will be able to communicate like never before using Office 365 and Skype for Business.

Skype Across Devices

Connect with your team anywhere using our mobile apps across Windows, iOS and AndroidTM, or bring remote participants into meeting spaces of all sizes with Skype for Business Room Systems.

Complete Meeting Solution

Work like you are all in one room, even when you are not. From collaborative team sessions to large broadcasts or dialing into a conference using your phone, Skype for Business is designed for all your meeting needs.

Modern Voice with Cloud PBX

Make, receive, and transfer business calls in the office, at home, or on the road using phone, PC, and mobile. Increase agility and consolidate management with voice services in Office 365.

Security, Control and Compliance

Get end-to-end security, control and compliance that span from the user to the enterprise. All powered by the on-demand scale and manageability of Office 365.

Skype for Business Voice

Our integrated communications offering helps you take advantage of the following services and capabilities of Office 365 and Skype for Business:

Anywhere Access – ability to make and receive business calls in the office, at home, or on the road, using your business number on your smartphone, tablet, PC, or desk phone.

PSTN Conferencing – provides the flexibility to dial in to a meeting from a traditional phone, in addition to the existing ability to join a meeting with a single click on your PC or mobile device.

Skype Meeting Broadcast – makes it easier than ever to produce large virtual meetings for up to 10,000 meeting attendees, who can join from virtually any browser or device (see it in action). Now Skype for Business truly is a single platform for every type of meeting.

Cloud PBX – enables companies to eliminate separate PBX systems and transition to the cloud with Office 365 as the center of communications management.

PSTN Calling – ability to subscribe to Microsoft managed calling plans and phone numbers.

Skype Connectivity – Connect, communicate, and collaborate with colleagues, consumers, other businesses, and friends and family – anyone who uses Skype – with both voice and HD video.

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3 Ways to Stay Organized with Microsoft Office 365

Businesses can improve their organization with Microsoft Office 365. New programs included with the Office package, such as Lync and Sharepoint, improve its functionality. Businesses can now collaborate and stay organized with Office 365 Online. Here are three examples of how you can do just that:

Organize Your Projects

With Office 365, you can encourage collaboration among employees. Even if employees are on different teams or in different departments, it’s easy to collaborate with Microsoft Sharepoint.

This improves project management simply by making it easier for businesses to stay organized. Rather than having to send files back and forth through email, employees can work on the same project together.

Organize Your Team

With Microsoft Lync, businesses can make internal communication easier than ever. Lync provides an optimal user experience that focuses on simplicity and functionality.

If you already use VoIP, then you can use Lync to keep your client base and employees more organized. If you’re considering switching to it, then Microsoft Lync makes the transition easier for employees.

Organize Your Documents

When you use Microsoft Sharepoint to save documents, you have the option of storing them on the cloud. Although this isn’t necessary, it helps businesses to keep track of their documents on a company-wide basis.

As a manager, it’s important for you to have access to all files from accounting spreadsheets to marketing presentations. Storing your documents on the cloud will make this easier.

Businesses that take full advantage of Microsoft Office 365 notice an improvement in organization and an increase in productivity. With Microsoft Lync and Microsoft Sharepoint, communication and collaboration are easier than ever.

To talk more about Microsoft Office 365, or anything else, please contact us.

Guess What? You Already Know How to Use Office 365, (and You Probably Already Love it Too!)

Because Office 365 is new to some people, they picture:

A program that’s hard to set up,
A program that’s only for Mac computers,
Some new app that’s only for mobile devices, or
Some confusing, new-fangled version of Microsoft products geared toward people who think the old platforms are useless or outdated.

However, Office 365 is essentially the best of the traditional Microsoft Office platform, combined with the simplest and most convenient upgrades that modern cloud computing has to offer. Though many products can easily lose their initial fan base when they upgrade or make changes to keep up with the times, by the time people most comfortable with Microsoft products understand what Office 365 actually is, everyone will realize it’s a genuinely perfect fit for most smb’s.

Why?

With 365, Microsoft gives users subscription-based access to its suite of office products. If you buy it for yourself, it’s less than $10 a month. However, many companies choose to buy it for their staff for several reasons:

Everyone in the office can collaborate on one secure system with ease.

It doesn’t matter if you’re in the office, or in another country; once you’ve connected your devices through the platform, you can quickly share documents and data through One Drive as if you were in the same office. This enables you to complete projects faster. In addition, since 365 is also integrated with Skype Lync, you can easily conduct business conferences and make free/cheap VoIP calls as well, without paying a separate company and without downloading special software.

Microsoft gives users 1 terabyte of cloud storage for each user, and each user is able to use the software on one laptop/desktop, one tablet and one phone.

Users also get full downloads of every standard Microsoft program including Outlook, Word, Excel, Sharepoint, Lync, Exchange, Power Point, One Note, Access and Publisher.

Lastly, let’s face it. The Microsoft product suite has always been notoriously expensive.

365 is basically the cheapest way anyone’s ever got a suite of Microsoft products directly from the manufacturer.

How to Use Office 365

Using Office 365 is as easy as using a website like Facebook or a software program like Skype.

You simply log into your account at portal.office.com, with the information in the email you received after you signed up.
Next, you change your password.
Then, when you’re ready to download your software, you download and install your software suite just like any other program. You just go through all the standard install prompts and options.
Once you’ve downloaded the software and your online access is up and running, you’re good to go. If you’ve ever used Microsoft Office before, you already know how to use Office 365.

However, if you have any questions or need any guidance at all — or find a program that’s new to you, because you’re mainly used to the standard programs; just contact us.

As your Managed Services Provider, 4 Corner IT offers you and your staff full installation and support for Office 365!

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IT Consulting in South Florida: Why Migration is the Hardest Aspect of Office 365

An important aspect of IT consulting is incorporating new programs and applications in your operations. Office 365 has been great so far in terms of increasing business productivity. It seems like the biggest problem businesses have had so far is migrating to the cloud. Once that’s set up, they have no trouble at all as far as adjusting to the hosted applications goes.

According to this article, migrating to Office 365 is becoming increasingly popular among businesses both large and small. The upside of moving from an on-premises environment to one hosted online by Microsoft offers compelling benefits.

There’s a reason migrating is the hardest part. Most business owners don’t have experience with cloud applications. Although they function like Windows program for the most part, setting them up is a different story.

For that reason, many businesses seek professional help to set their hosted applications up. According to a recent Info World article, this is particularly common with Office 365’s cloud Exchange:

“Office 365 has been touted as Microsoft’s fastest growing business ever. Still, some organizations are stalling when it comes to moving mailboxes from on-premises Exchange to Office 365’s cloud Exchange. What’s the holdup? For some, the need to plan and execute the transition may be competing with other day-to-day issues, delaying the Office 365 Exchange migration.”

Exchange is perhaps Microsoft’s most important program for businesses. But because they rely on email so much, they’re hesitant to migrate to the new hosted Exchange.

Here’s the good news: after the migration is over, your business productivity will increase. Employees will have access to the hosted Exchange from remote locations. The standard benefits of cloud computing also apply to hosted Exchange in this context.

The important thing is that you get the migration right. If you mess with the settings and employees aren’t able to send outgoing emails, then your productivity will take a hit. You can avoid this problem altogether by working with a professional IT agency. In this case, you’ll know that you’re starting off on the right foot regarding Office 365.

To talk more about IT consulting in South Florida, or anything else, please contact us.

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Three Things Your Old Office Suite Can’t Do; The Cloud, Office 365, and VoIP

“When I wrote ‘The World Is Flat,’ I said the world is flat. Yeah, we’re all connected. Facebook didn’t exist; Twitter was a sound; the cloud was in the sky; 4G was a parking place; LinkedIn was a prison; applications were what you sent to college; and Skype, for most people, was a typo.”

-Thomas Friedman, Author and Journalist, New York Times

Larry Ellison, Steve Jobs, Bill Gates, and their peers, all spoke wistfully about a world where large servers on the Internet do all the work, and the only device that any citizen uses is a ‘thin client’ to interact with these servers across the network. In spite of their evangelizing, none of them predicted the system we have in place now; in fact, many business users are—at this moment—unaware of how much power and flexibility exists in this ‘cloud and client’ system that is quickly replacing legacy systems where everyone’s power sits directly under their desk.

The Cloud is something most of us are familiar with, that large data center far away where all of our critical data is stored in case of a catastrophe, hardware failure, or otherwise unforeseen loss of vital information. According to a recent article, the cloud is a network of servers, and each server has a different function. Some servers use computing power to run applications or “deliver a service.” Businesses have come to realize that backing up to the cloud is critically important; however, for a large percentage, this is as much cloud integration they have with their office.

Office 365 was for many businesses, the first glimpse of the cloud as a productivity tool; after all, with the introduction of 365, Microsoft was cannibalizing their bestselling product, the ubiquitous Office 2013 Suite of locally run applications. We are all familiar with the old Office lifecycle, buy the license, and constantly update the product with security patches and feature enhancements, then watch, as compatibility becomes an issue when a newer version of Office becomes the standard.

With Office 365, the updates are in the cloud, the security, the hardware, the IT support, the compatibility—all of it handled in the cloud. All the user needs is a browser, on any device connected to the Internet; even better, everybody can collaborate in real-time, contact lists are synced, emails, calendars, instant messaging, (even VoIP) the entire team is on the same page no matter where those team members are. These are all reasons why this past ‘upgrade cycle’ businesses have finally migrated to the cloud-based Office 365.

Yes, with Office 365’s, Lync Online component, Office 365 can do everything mentioned above, while also serving as a comprehensive communications platform. In summary, a user purchasing a license for Office 365 is able to use Exchange for email, SharePoint for documents, but also leverage Lync for a fully desktop integrated phone system replacing legacy systems, or any current VoIP system.

Office 365 is appearing everywhere, especially now that Microsoft is offering free one-year subscriptions with a slew of new mobile devices. Couple this with the distinct business advantages, and VoIP integration, and you’ll realize it is time to contact 4 Corner IT and get started. To keep up with the latest news, follow us @4CornerIT, or come join the conversation on our Facebook page, we understand your business, not just your technology.

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