Speaker: Before we start this brief instruction to SharePoint online, I have a confession to make. I'm actually a little bit in love with SharePoint, the reason I love it is because it’s actually possible through SharePoint to share documents I seen the name really. So previously I'm used to having five megabyte excel spreadsheets sent to me, I have to change one cell then forward it on to someone else in my organization and its horrible it bulks up my inbox and you get different versions of the same document everywhere, so it’s a terrible problem but SharePoint solves in a trice.
Now SharePoint isn’t always the easiest thing for a normal IT expert to set up, so what I like about SharePoint online, is that its possible for anyone pretty much, any business to use it, but I pretty said too much so I'm going to hand over to the real expert on this, which is Simon who works for Microsoft MSP, Evangelist for SharePoint. I think I've done your job for you Simon, but and very briefly how would you define SharePoint online?
Simon May: Well like to create a single version of the truth for documents, so very simplistically you're examples for emailing around a spreadsheet that’s going to create so if you send that to three people, three people may change it, you’ve taken a five megabyte spreadsheet and turned it into three five megabytes spreadsheets, is in peoples inboxes so you instantly get to this idea of a little bit of bulks due to the size of the files. But more often you actually lose somebody’s edits in the process flow, you just lose the file, that somebody made a change, you don’t appreciate all the changes everybody did and SharePoint actually prevents you from doing that because everybody can edit the same document at the same point in time.
Speaker: And then SharePoint online what's the, what is the real benefit that brings to small businesses?
Simon May: So much of what you get in SharePoint 2010 for on premises is there in SharePoint online, what you really do get though is the file is ran out of Microsoft state centers, we’re running the hardware, we’re looking after the SharePoint servers we’re making sure everything’s available and we give you enough time and guarantee, there is availability there for you.
Speaker: And what do you see Connor you're company has to integrate the software solutions and you find real businesses are using it and how you think that people are using SharePoint now?
Conor Callanan: Well traditionally SharePoint would be sold to larger organizations simply because of the cost of implementing it and the time it takes to put it into an infrastructure. With SharePoint online you can have it up and running in 24hours, it’s absolutely fantastic its bringing enterprise class for down to the SME’s.
Speaker: And is it really that easy to implement?
Conor Callanan: Share point is like any platform you have to learn it; there are plenty of free tools available, plenty of videos in YouTube excreta, excreta. But again you can turn to a partner like ourselves who have many years experience in SharePoint and we can help you through that process.
Speaker: And how does it actually, how does it work in with the rest of the office 365 system.
Conor Callanan: Again its seamlessly integrated, I mean that its quite funny some of the customers we deal with they are actually between office 2010 professional pro plus and SharePoint they actually don’t know which product they're actually in because they all look and feel the same, they don’t know whether they're in outlook or they're in the SharePoint work space or whether they're actually on a SharePoint site. So it’s, even for the user it’s a very, very good experience, using familiar tools and tool sets.
Speaker: And does that echo with you David?
David Fearon: Well Tim it was the becoming of SharePoint or nothing and also, I'm a little bit in love with SharePoint, I mean its funny because the point kind of touched on there was they say it’s complicated setup, their services offered, for quite a few years I didn’t really know what SharePoint actually did because it is immediately the fact that the barrier to entry is traditionally has been enormous and I couldn’t really quite work out how it would fit into business and what it would do. With office 365 its just there, its set up for you and its just there you start using it straight away, its completely fundamental to the work flow and its just awesome and it really is, and I don’t use that word often but its just completely it saves all of that stuff with the fragmentation of documents and now this I like the single version the truth which is actually what it is, it just gives you one and one piece information and stays in one place it doesn’t get replicated anywhere and its just its fantastic it really is, I cant praise it highly enough, its awesome.
Speaker: That’s high praise indeed. So what else did it do though it’s not just for sharing documents is it?
Simon May: Its not, you can actually use it to create your internal internet site so you can have things like very simply, having lists, having information about what's going on within your organization as an intranet, you can also use it to present an external face of your organization as well, to present a corporate website to you're customers, you can take as much as that as you want to as being the vanilla SharePoint experience. You can actually really customize it with design tools and make it look completely your own, it doesn’t have to look like a SharePoint site, or if you want to make it nice and simple you just take what comes out of the box.
Speaker: And the actual width, there are some very large websites that run on SharePoint aren’t there? I'm intrigued can name a couple at the top of your head?
Simon May: I try to remember the [indiscernible] [00:05:01] is tricky but it points I think Ferrari have been running that on their website and there's a few others as well I think the Hawaii tourist agency at one point.
Speaker: Ah… well there you go, cant get better than Hawaii tourist agency. Okay is there anything else that you would add Connor that you think the difference SharePoint can make to a business and SharePoint online in particular.
Conor Callanan: The difference SharePoint can make is like any web technology instead of distributing applications in a traditional manner which was you had to go and install a client on a local laptop or local desktop, you can run your applications as if they were a website an in particular when you take the power of an excel spreadsheet and you want to just share something like the graph inside that excel spreadsheet, you put that into SharePoint, display the graph and now all of a sudden everybody can see that graph, they don’t have to go and find the right spreadsheet, open the right spreadsheet. They can go to a web page and then get access to that information, that’s absolutely fantastic for you know.
Speaker: And actually that does remind me about one of the other thing I love a bit, and this same system a little bit like 11 but excel 2010 does have some brilliant abilities such as the dashboard ability to give business information at a glance, so presumably that’s where SharePoint online comes in as well.
Simon May: Yeah absolutely you can take, some information in a spreadsheet and publish that directly out to your SharePoint, so people don’t have to go and open up a excel document in order to be able to get access to that information.
Speaker: Okay. Well I think I've confessed quite enough in this video so we’ll call a halt to it there. If you’d like an introduction to exchange online or to link online we do have other videos covering those topics on this site.