Office 365 Business Essential is the starting package under the Business plans that enable businesses to smoothen collaboration amongst their employees through tools like HD video conferencing and online file sharing. It also facilitates the employees to work from anywhere through various internet enabled devices, allowing them to create, edit & share Word, Excel, PowerPoint and OneNote documents whenever they want. Key features included in this package are:
Apart from the above discussed features, the Office 365 Business Essential package offers high reliability, security and administrative features that help an organization keep all the concerned people thoroughly updated. To help manage the user permissions and credentials, Active Directory integration is also offered in this package. Microsoft offers telephone and online support to all the users subscribing to the Office 365 Business Essential package. However, an organization can have only 300 users at maximum under this package.
- Email and Calendars: This is a business class email that allows the users to access their emails from desktops, laptops, and mobile devices. Shared calendars allow the users to find when people are busy or free, which makes scheduling meeting and other activities easier. Also, Emails, contacts, and calendars can be easily shared across multiple devices in real-time.
- Instant messaging & Skype connectivity: With this feature Office 365 users can use Lync to connect with other Lync users through instant messaging, and audio & video calls. Recent updates in this feature allow the Lync users to connect with Skype users also.
- Online Conferencing: This feature allows the users to communicate with their business partners seamlessly through multi-party HD video conferencing, which seems as if you are talking face to face with the other person/persons.
- Social Networking: This feature allows the users to maximize the social productivity of their organization by integrating Yammer with Office 365. With better social networking, companies can engage and collaborate with their target audience, and incorporate their feedback in their products and services.
- Simplified file storage & sharing: OneDrive for Business gives 1Tb storage space to every individual user where he/she can store important files and documents, and access them from practically anywhere. Also, with this feature, files can be shared seamlessly with people inside & outside the organization.
- Team sites: With this package, companies get 10GB baseline storage space for storing and sharing documents, which can be accessed by users across the organization. An additional 500MB space is also provided for every individual user.
- Mobile apps: The users can access, view, and edit Word, PowerPoint, and Excel documents through their Windows phone, iPhones and Android phones. Also, OneNote, Lync Mobile, OWA, and SharePoint Newsfeed apps can be used across all these devices for increasing the employees’ productivity.
- Search & Discovery: Staying in the know is critical for every modern business. With Office 365, users can search & discover the required content across the enterprise based on their personal insights. Powered by Office Graph, Office 365 offers a collection of analysed insights derived from a user's relationships & behavior with content, contacts, and topics.
Apart from the above discussed features, the Office 365 Business Essential package offers high reliability, security and administrative features that help an organization keep all the concerned people thoroughly updated. To help manage the user permissions and credentials, Active Directory integration is also offered in this package. Microsoft offers telephone and online support to all the users subscribing to the Office 365 Business Essential package. However, an organization can have only 300 users at maximum under this package.