As Microsoft’s cloud offering  is booming within the small to medium business sector in Portland Metropolitan and Beaverton area Office 365 is always compared to google apps but a lot of other questions come up. We found a very nice list provided at office365.com and find that we must share.

Q. What is the difference between Office and Office 365?

A. Office is productivity software (including Word, PowerPoint, Excel, Outlook, and OneNote) that is installed on your desktop or laptop computer. Office 365 is an online subscription service that provides email, shared calendars, the ability to create and edit documents online, instant messaging, web conferencing, a public website for your business, and internal team sites—all accessible anywhere from nearly any device.
Customers with Office 2010 installed on their computer can quickly configure their software to work with Office 365. These users can easily retrieve, edit and save Office docs in the Office 365 cloud, co-author docs in real-time with others, quickly initiate PC-to-PC calls, instant messages and web conferences with others.
Office 365 is also compatible with Office 2007 and newer editions of Office and select Office 365 plans include Office Professional Plus.

Q. What is the cloud?

A. The cloud is a friendly way of describing web-based computing services. Information storage, computation, and software are located and managed remotely on servers owned by Microsoft. Because this infrastructure is located online, you can access it virtually anywhere from a desktop, laptop, or mobile phone.

Q. How many users does Office 365 support?

A. Office 365 is scalable and can support everyone from a one-person business to companies with tens of thousands of users. Office 365 for small businesses (Plan P1) is best for companies with up to 25 employees and can accommodate up to 50 users. Office 365 midsized business and enterprise plans (E1-4) and kiosk plans (K1-K2) fit organizations ranging in size from a single employee to 50,000-plus users. You can compare all the options here. Our plan advisor can help you select the best plan for your needs.

Q. Will Office 365 work with my copy of Office?

A. Office 365 works with best with Office 2010 and Office 2011 for Mac. Office 365 also works with slightly limited functionality for Office 2007 and Office 2008 for Mac. If you have an earlier edition of Office, you will need to update to a newer version of Office in order to use Office 365.

Q. Where’s my country? I do not see it in the drop down list on the signup page.

A. Office 365 is offered in a number of countries and languages. If your country is not visible, that means Microsoft has not currently launched a version of Office 365 for your market. Microsoft continues to launch Office 365 in new markets and will publicly announce when they launch Office 365 in any new market.

If you are in Vancouver, Washington or in Oregon and in the Portland Metropolitan, or Beaverton area contact us now to find out how we can get you a trial of Office 365

Click here for a free 10 user trial license 

The post Office 365 Q&A Top Questions appeared first on One Up Solutions.

Now is the time to move to the cloud…

                             …and be successful with One Up Solutions.

We know you have question and we are here to help.

Q. Where can I get Office 365 plan details?

A.You can get all the details and a comparison of Office 365 plans by sending an email to us from our contact us page.

Q. What do I need to install when I sign up for Office 365?

A.You don’t need to install anything in order to use Office 365.

To easily connect your desktop version of Office 2010 and 2007 to Office 365, Microsoft provides Office 365 customers an installable piece of software—called Office desktop setup—at no charge.

Office desktop setup provides many benefits, including:

•   Automatically detecting necessary updates.
•   Installing updates and components upon approval or silently from a command line.
•   Automatically configuring Outlook and Microsoft Lync for use with Microsoft Office 365.
•   Uninstalling itself from the client computer after running.

If your plan includes a subscription to Office Professional Plus, you will also be able to install the latest version directly from the Office 365.

Q. Are there any minimum purchase requirements?

A. You only need to purchase one Office 365 seat license.

Q. What if I already own a domain name?

A. You can add the domain name you own to Office 365 to create both domain-based email addresses and a public-facing website. Find more domain-related answers  by sending an email to us from our contact us page .

Q. Will my trial information be transferred to my Office 365 subscription?

A. Yes. If you purchase an Office 365 subscription with the same number of user accounts you created by the end of your free trial, the information and configuration for these users’ accounts will remain intact. Once your free trial expires, you won’t be able to continue trialing Office 365. You will have an additional 30 days to purchase Office 365 before your account information is erased. Once your trial account information has been erased, it cannot be retrieved.

Click here for a free 10 user trial license 

The post Getting started with Office 365 – FAQ appeared first on One Up Solutions.

Real world testimonials from customers who deployed or seriously evaluated Google Apps then realized that implementing Microsoft productivity solutions (including office 365) was a better decision for their business. Each customer shares a unique story around their challenges with Google Apps and reasons why Microsoft and Office 365 was a better fit for their business and productivity needs.

You businesses need enterprise-proven productivity solutions at a reasonable cost. Contact One Up Solutions Northwest for more information.

Contact Us

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Windows XP was released back in October 2001, and still today, many users and businesses still use it every day. Even in 2012, XP’s market share is around 27%. Is your business still using Windows XP? How much longer should XP be kept around?

Windows Vista put a bad taste in a lot of people’s mouths, so for many, sticking with what worked was much more attractive than stepping into the unknown. Windows 7 vastly improved upon the issues found in Vista, but by then many users were content with keeping their older PCs alive.

Microsoft does their due diligence to ease the world into a new OS; they support older operating systems long after they are replaced and work with hardware manufacturers to make it easy to upgrade to the latest incarnation when users purchase new laptops and PCs. Of course, with stellar IT management and a little luck, PCs can last a lot longer than expected, so users don’t always feel the need to upgrade.

There are drawbacks to not upgrading, however. Older operating systems quickly become unsupported by third-party software developers, which means upgrades to the other software you use on a day-to-day basis may not be compatible with your OS. Even though Microsoft will continue to support XP and provide security updates and patches until April 2014, most everybody else has moved on to Windows 7 and are gearing up for Windows 8. In some ways, even Microsoft has ceased support for XP already; Internet Explorer 9 and some other Windows applications are only available for later versions of Windows.

Taking advantage of the features in Windows 7 can vastly improve security and performance for businesses, and grant you access to modern best practices and software solutions to increase productivity and improve the way you do business.

Are you still running XP? Fill out the form on the Contact us page for help devising a smooth upgrade plan that will get your company ready for the future.

The post Is it time to DITCH Windows XP? appeared first on One Up Solutions.

Do you know what office 365 is?

Large enterprises have the pick of the crop when it comes to office software,  despite budgets being stretched, they have a lot more capital to play with.

But what about those in the smal to medium level business? These companies are grown up enough to have some dedicated IT and technology but lack the cash to splash on expensive licenses, or the time to waste on lengthy deployments.

Office 365 can help those businesses in the middle get everything they need, without squandering their much-needed hours and capital.Seamless integration

This is all great for the future or for a medium business just setting itself up, but what if you are well established and already have some of your own IT architecture on premise?

Microsoft knows it is important to get the full life out of your investments internally and realises you may want to keep some data on your doorstep. As such, it provides seamless integration between on and off premises, making sure no scrap of IT goes to waste.

Safe and secure

Your data is your intellectual property and is what allows you to run your business, standing out from your competition.

Also your customer data represents your reputation and you can’t have that falling into the wrong hands.

Microsoft had safety and security of your data in mind when building up this new service and employs the highest levels of security, both physically for its data centres and virtually across the networks and hardware.

The added bonus is, as a medium enterprise, you are sharing a space with huge corporations and getting the same level of security they expect. This means getting protection for your data you could never have afforded at your own office.

On top of that, Microsoft has addressed the issue of EU regulation. Microsoft opened a data centre in Dublin back in 2009 and European customers can now host their data at the specific location, ensuring it sticks with all the data privacy rules made by the European Union.

The support you need

We know you guys know how to run an email system, but entrusting that to someone else could be the make or break of your business. Microsoft takes that responsibility very seriously and guarantees uptime of 99.9 per cent per month, giving compensation if it falls below that agreed level.

On top of that, if anything does go wrong or you need help, Microsoft offers a support team which works 24 hours a day, seven days a week. You can contact them through the phone, over the web or on email and they will do their utmost to get you back up and running as soon as possible.

With a strong service level agreement and always on support, you get everything you need.

Medium business, high priority

When Microsoft unveiled Office 365 it told the world that medium sized businesses were their target and they wanted to get them on-board. Built with the midway enterprise in mind, Office 365 could give your business all you need when it comes to office software.

Contact Us

Need more info? Watch this video from Microsoft.

The post What is Office365? appeared first on One Up Solutions.

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Great news for our Office 365 customers!  Microsoft has just pushed out an update that will give Office 365 customers the ability to record online meetings and calls. The new features allows you to capture all aspects of a meeting or call: audio, video, instant messaging (IM), program sharing, Microsoft PowerPoint presentations, whiteboards, and polls. Once recorded you will have the ability to review the content via the recording manager or save it to a Windows media format and send it to others.

To enable this for your company just submit a support ticket http://support.1upnw.com

For detailed instructions on using the recording features click here

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Is the cold weather going to trap you at home this week? Or will some of your employees not be able to make it in to work? Maybe you know someone who will find themselves, or their company, affected by the cold front, limiting their productivity and limiting their ability to continue with business as usual. Well, we have the solution.

One Up Solutions provides support for small to medium sized businesses throughout the Portland area. We provide organizations, and individuals, with an easy-to-use, secure solution by implementing secure remote access and remote support. Using the system we put in place, you will find that your business team is more productive as they can access work from anywhere, at anytime. And when the weather does not want to cooperate with the important tasks at hand, your staff will still be able to function effectively from wherever they may be.

Nature is unpredictable, and companies lose valuable productivity time when staff members are unable to get to work and do not have the system in place to work remotely. That’s where One Up Solutions comes in. We work to keep your business running, no matter what nature throws our way.

Our clients work hard to continue to develop their business and stay ahead of the competition, so losing valuable work time is not an option. Call us today and pass along this important, useful information to business contacts and peers. We look forward to the opportunity to discuss how we can help your organization be set up for success no matter what the weather conditions may be this winter.

Please contact One Up Solutions at info@1upnw.com or call 503-278-5011 for more infomation……

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