Office 365 Enterprise E5: The latest capabilities for Office

Office 365 Enterprise E5 is one of the latest offerings from Microsoft.  It is designed for teams and networks.  With Skype for Business (now Microsoft Teams) built in, your teams have a single platform they can use for calls, conferences, video conferences, and file sharing.  You can connect with your teams in a fast and simple environment while using the Office applications they are already familiar with.  The following examines some of the other features you can expect in Enterprise E5.

E5 will cover an entire collaboration suite that Office 365 already provides in addition to new capabilities such as Cloud PBX and PSTN Conferencing.  E5 will also feature Power BI Pro and Delve Organizational Analytics along with new security features from eDiscovery, Advanced Threat Protection, and Customer Lockbox.  The suite will offer new opportunities for Microsoft Partners to build their services to reach out to new customers and increase value added for existing customers.

E5 will include virtually every capability they can offer in the service.  This will include some features you are already used to with E4, only more advanced.  While E5 isn’t slated for release until the end of 2015, you can expect the changes to roll out as soon as possible and even try out a free trial.

Features

In addition to the Office Suite of products and the ability to use E5 on your PCs, tablets, and smartphones, you can expect several additional features listed below.

Calling -   If you’re hosting a teleconference, attendees can dial into your Skype meetings from any device.  If you are organizing a call, you can dial out to bring your attendees into the conference.  People can join an online meeting you set up even if they don’t have Internet access and are using a PSTN line.  This means nobody will ever miss a meeting because they aren’t online.  It is easy to connect wherever each participant is.  Video meetings are made very simple and are an effective way to meet and greet as an alternative to face to face meetings.

Cloud based calling - With Cloud-based call management you can eliminate the need for having a separate PBX phone system for your business.  Call management is delivered by Skype for Business.  You can choose to add PSTN calling to your Cloud PBX for traditional phone calls and manage them with call forwarding, transfer, hold, and resume.

Email, calendars, and advanced email – You will receive 50GB of storage, unlimited archive storage, and you can send attachments up to 150MB.  This is a rich and familiar experience you have seen glimpses of in Outlook before.  In addition, you can use archiving and legal hold capabilities for compliance needs.  You can use data loss prevention (DLP) policies and tips to help inform your users for additional compliance enforcement through email.

Document control – Rights Management Services is a feature that will allow you to restrict access at a document and email level.  You can set access so that your users can only send emails to specific people and prevent others from viewing or editing them regardless if they are in your organization or not.

Information protection and security – DLP helps protect your information across Exchange Online, Skype for Business, and SharePoint Online to help ensure your content is safe whether its in IMs, meetings, email, and team sites.  With E5’s advanced security that helps protect you against unknown and more sophisticated threats in emails, attachments, and links, Advanced Threat Protection is there to serve.  With Customer Lockbox, you can maintain transparency and control by limiting access to data by pre-assigned and two-factor authentication with administrator rights.

Storage – With OneDrive for Business your users will receive 1TB of storage each. This personal Cloud storage can be accessed anywhere and will sync up with Mac or PC for access offline.  Documents can easily be shared inside and out of your organization with full control over who can view and edit your files.  You’ll always have the newest version of your files because everything is stored in the Cloud.  This makes things easier to organize and share as well as collaboration on documents with other team members.  With the controlled access to your files you can eliminate back and forth headache of emailing documents which will save you time.

Team Sites – Through Yammer collaboration software and easy access and sharing of documents with up to 10GB of baseline storage with 500 MB of storage per user, you can share your team’s insights through interactive reporting with Excel and Visio.  You can view these documents on mobile device browsers that support HTML5.  Yammer gives your work teams a place they can meet and collaborate in real time anywhere they are at.  This offers you the ability to streamline your projects by looping relevant stakeholders into conversations to drive teamwork.  You can even loop vendors and customers into conversations.

Sway – This is a new Office 365 app that enables you to create engaging interactive web reports, newsletters, briefings, etc. straight from your tablet, smartphone, or browser.  This interactive storytelling enables you to bring interactive content to life.  You can include a video to help explain your ideas and add an interactive chart to allow others to get into your details.

Mobility – Lastly, what good is Office 365 if you don’t have mobility access?  As Microsoft continues to evolve, E5 continues to drive your mobility.  You can sync your emails, calendars, and contacts across SharePoint Online sites and view and edit Office documents through Office Online through a web browser on multiple mobile devices.  You can also use a remote wipe feature to wipe Office 365 data from selected devices so you don’t lose data or risk it going with your workers if they quit or get fired.

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  Agile IT has migrated over 500,000 users to Office 365 with 100% success.  You can read some of our clients’ stories here, or to learn how to take full advantage of what the Microsoft cloud has to offer, contact us today.