Office 365 Trial Setup

Last week I wrote about Microsoft's decision to donate Office 365 to nonprofit organizations. This week I will come back to Office 365 and show how to set up a trial.

In the kalmstrom.com Tips section there is an article about how to set up an Office 365 trial. It has the demo below and also step by step instructions.

MS cloud platform
Office 365 is Microsoft's cloud platform. It builds on the Microsoft Office suite and gives hosted e-mail, storage, networking and collaboration and more. You subscribe to Office 356, just like you subcribe to the kalmstrom.com solutions.

The most important advantage of Office 365 is that the Office applications and other software like Exchange and SharePoint are possible to reach from everywhere over the internet. And users who have earlier worked with the Office desktop applcations will recognize the programs and can continue using them online without training.

All the kalmstrom.com applications work with the Office 365 versions of the products we build on – Outlook, SharePoint, Excel and Exchange.

Office 365 version
There are several versions of Office 365, and in my demo I set up a trial of the Enterprise E3 version, which is the one I prefer. I recommend you to study and compare the different options carefully and to select a version that is a little better than what you need right now. It is not always easy to upgrade to a more advanced version later.

Start with SharePoint
After entering all details and adding another user I finish my demo by setting up SharePoint. kalmstrom.com build on SharePoint, and many viewers of my tutorials are interested in SharePoint. I can see that on the number of visitors to my SharePoint-demos in the kalmstrom.com Tips section and on YouTube.

kalmstrom.com usage
In the kalmstrom.com team all members are using the Office 365 Outlook, Exchange and SharePoint, and it has worked well for us. We are a geographically distributed team, working in Sweden, India and Spain, so for us it is perfect to share mail and team site in the cloud.

To further enhance Office 365 we use our own products HelpDesk OSP for support mail and for our own improvement suggestions and Kanban Task Manager for our project and task management.

If you have been thinking about Office 365 but not tried it yet, I suggest that you do. You might not want to transfer everything from desktop to Office 365, but it surely is a good complement to other software.

By Peter Kalmstrom
CEO and Systems Designer
kalmstrom.com Business Solutions