OneDrive and SharePoint

Office 365 is a cloud-based subscription service that brings together tools to help people work together. By combining best-in-class apps like Excel and Outlook with powerful cloud services like OneDrive and Microsoft Teams, Office 365 lets anyone create and share anywhere, on any device.

In today’s world of cloud storage and collaboration, Office 365 brings powerful tools – OneDrive and SharePoint – to users’ fingertips to let you create, edit, store, and share files directly from the cloud, and makes them accessible on any device, from anywhere with an Internet connection. You can even download files to your device to work on offline if you won’t have a connection, to be uploaded when you do.

Many people use OneDrive personally to store files they may need access to while they’re away from their home computers. Microsoft provides personal users with 5GB free storage initially, with higher plans available. The higher basic plan gives you 50GB of storage space, while the highest tiers are full Office 365 plans, meaning you’ll have the great features of OneDrive for Business with a lot more storage space (1TB), plus the full Microsoft Office suite of products. OneDrive for Business includes all the features of OneDrive, with additional security and compliance features.

OneDrive for Business is included with all business and enterprise Office 365 subscriptions. You can also purchase OneDrive for Business plans separately.  You can store documents of all types (up to 15GB in size) in your OneDrive space, and with folders and protection options available, you can ensure that the contents are safe.

For small and mid-sized businesses, an intranet can be a great way of keeping all staff up to date on the current news of the company, as well as making all documents accessible to all required staff. The great thing about SharePoint is that although if you want, everyone can see everything, there are also powerful tools in place to ensure that certain documents and folders are restricted. This means that your finance team can view the finance documents, while your marketing team can view their own documents, but neither can see the other. That’s extremely useful for keeping data confidential but accessible.

Another great perk of SharePoint is that it ensures that everyone with access to a document is viewing and working on the most up-to-date version. No more last minute panics because the finance team have been working on a month old version of a document that was actually updated a few days ago. The collaboration features of Office Online also mean that the worry of saving over a document that someone else is working on at the same time is completely gone. You’ll instead see changes live (as long you have an Internet connection) within the document, and the documents keep saving automatically!

SharePoint comes included with Office 365 Business Premium and Office 365 Business Essentials but is not included with Office 365 Business. It is also available in all enterprise Office 365 subscriptions. You can buy SharePoint separately, where it comes with OneDrive bundled in. SharePoint Online Plan 1 includes 1TB of OneDrive storage, while Plan 2 comes with unlimited storage.

OneDrive and SharePoint are just two pieces of the Office 365 package, and even alone are powerful tools. Working in teams is made much easier with always-connected and up-to-date documents, keeping everyone on the same page. Combined with the power of other Office 365 apps and services, organisations of any size can help employees to help themselves, by giving them the tools they need to succeed and be productive.

You can talk to us about your Office 365 requirements by emailing us at sales@burstfire.net or calling us on 020 7127 4922.