Office 365 for small businesses part 3: Professional Websites and Collaboration

The Internet can really level the playing field for professionals and small businesses. It can help you put your business and your brand out there. And it can give you new ways to work with your team and your customers. SharePoint Online in Office 365 makes it a snap to have a professional presence on the Web and use the Web to work together more efficiently—all with a familiar interface with no coding or IT management.

Get a professional, up-to-date Web site—in minutes

With Office 365, you don’t have to hire a consultant or learn HTML to create and update a pro-quality Web site. The first thing you’ll want to do is get your own domain name that helps customers find and remember your Web site. You can use your domain name with Office 365 to project a professional presence.

Now it’s time to build your Web site. It’s easiest to start with one of the many professionally-designed templates included with Office 365. You select and edit your Web site using the Office ribbon that you’re familiar with from Word and other Office programs. You can add and position images and add text and links as easily as if you were creating a Word document. Then, preview your Web site to see how it will look to customers.

One of the best things about a Web site is that you can keep it up to date with new information about your company, including news, events, and new products or services. With Office 365, you can easily edit your Web site without touching a line of code. Preview changes to make sure they look right, save the changes, and your updates are live almost instantly.

Work together on documents

Whether you’re writing a proposal, preparing a presentation, analyzing financials, or creating a marketing brochure, Office 365 gives you tools for working together on documents in a faster and more efficient way than through email.

When collaborating over email, you either have to wait for each member of the team to make changes, or worse yet, work in parallel and merge the changes by hand. With a SharePoint Team Site and you’ll be amazed at how it transforms the process. Everyone can access the latest version of the document in a central location so they’re always responding to the most up-to-date information.

Want to work on a document offline? Use SharePoint Workspace* to sync a document library with your PC. Changes you make offline are synced to the original next time you connect.

Don’t have Office handy on your computer? Use Office Web Apps to work with documents through any Web browser. You’ll see the documents in full fidelity and make edits with the confidence that the original formatting and structure of the document will be preserved.

Creating a Team Site and adding sites to it is easy. Just choose a template from the extensive menu of options and your site is ready to go. You can even set up a Team Site that lets you leave comments and status updates like a social networking site so the team always knows what’s up and who’s doing what.

With SharePoint Online in Office 365, you can get a professional presence on the Web and get new, yet familiar ways to work together—all with the familiar Office 365 experience.

-Allen, Office 365 Product Manager

*SharePoint Workspace comes with Office Pro Plus, which comes with some Office 365 plans and be added onto all others