Office 365 for small businesses part 4: Online Meetings and IM

Audience: Small Business and Professionals

Online meetings - getting work done in a mobile world

No matter what the size of your business, you've probably attended online meetings and conference calls. With today’s mobile workforce, they're an essential part of getting work done. With Office 365, you now have a powerful, easy way to schedule and host your own online meetings—no IT staff, complicated software or complex dial-ins required. And these aren't just audio conferences—you can deliver a PowerPoint presentation, share your screen, use a virtual whiteboard, and even use videoconferencing for better communication and a more personal touch.

For many of us, the work day starts in email. While slogging through our inbox, we setup meetings to brainstorm, gather agreement on projects, settle on execution plans and more. By having your email, contacts, calendar and online meetings all working as one in Office 365, this task becomes a matter of a few clicks. Right form an email thread, you can schedule meetings and use the Scheduling Assistant to search everyone’s calendar for the best time, avoiding the back and forth in email to find the perfect time. To make it even easier - it even recommends the best times without you having to search! The thread becomes part of the invitation so everyone is on the same page, and you can add your own comments to set the agenda or provide context. With MailTips, Outlook lets you know who is out of the office and shows their out-of-office reply so you can find out if someone else is taking on their responsibilities while they are gone.

Now that the time and people are chosen, you can add an online meeting to the invitation. That lets remote team members join, or lets you host a meeting with an out-of-town client without having to get on a plane. Joining the meeting is simple…just a single click from the meeting invite—no more punching in conference codes on the phone keypad. For your partners and clients who might not have Lync, they can join the same way using a browser or by downloading the Lync attendee client to their PCs.  If someone leaves the meeting and needs to come back, it's as simple as clicking the "Rejoin" button.

With Lync Online in Office 365, you get a lot more than just a conference line and IM. In addition to PC-to-PC audio, you can add video conferencing that automatically switches to the participant who is speaking. You can share your desktop or deliver a PowerPoint presentation (or other Office document) and participants have the ability to skip ahead if they've already seen it and view slides privately so they can focus on the pieces that are most relevant to them. Want to brainstorm? Open an interactive whiteboard for mind mapping or planning a task. You can even share your screen to present any kind of document or application.

As the meeting host, you have ultimate control over the meeting. At the beginning of the meeting, participants are held in a waiting room and you can decide who can join in case the meeting has sensitive content. If you're doing a team presentation, you can give control to someone else so they can do their part. You can even mute participants whose lines are noisy.

All of this power is at your fingertips, and it's as easy to use as the Microsoft Office applications you're familiar with. Participants don't need user accounts or special equipment, and you don't have to manage or install any special software to make it work.

Watch this video to see the full demo of what I described above:

Instant messaging - quick answers = quicker actions

With the fast pace of business these days, you need answers quickly. Instant messaging is today's key tool for communicating quickly, and Lync Online in Office 365 delivers provides these capabilties that are built to work with the Office you know and love. When you add Office Pro Plus to Office 365, you can communicate with your right from Word, PowerPoint, Excel, Outlook...pretty much any Office application. Because you can see team members' presence information in these apps as well as in SharePoint Online, you can get ahold of your colleagues and achieve your goals quickly. And ff you're having an IM conversation and need to turn it into a full online meeting described above, it's as easy as a few clicks. In addition, you can initiate a document collaboration session and work together on a deliverable in real time. Lync Online makes using IM in your business so easy to use you'll wonder how you ever lived without it.

-Allen, Office 365 Product Manager