Page 291 - MS Office 365 for Dummies 3rd Ed (2019)

Synchronized Data
A real inefficiency booster is having different versions of documents scattered all over the place. You might have one version of a document at work and another version on your home computer and yet another version on your laptop. Documents have a bad habit of multiplying as well. When you send a document to people in an email, they save it to their computer and then make changes. Very quickly, there are multiple documents, and it becomes nearly impossible to determine which version contains the needed information.
With Office 365 and SharePoint Online, you have a centralized home for all documents. You can access those documents from multiple computers (or even your mobile phone) and by multiple people. Regardless of how many people or devices are accessing the document, only a single version of the document exists on SharePoint. Because SharePoint is in the cloud and accessed over the Internet, you only need an Internet connection or cell reception in order to access your enterprise data.
In addition to documents, Office 365 lets you synchronize all your email, calendar, and contacts onto multiple devices. If you use Outlook at home, at the office, on your phone, and on your tablet, you don’t have to worry about being on the wrong device when trying to find a contact at work. You don’t have to worry about missing an appointment because all the devices you use synchronize with Exchange Online. You don’t have to worry about forgetting a Word, Excel, or PowerPoint document, because it is on your phone or tablet and can be opened with Office. The result is that your appointments, email, contacts, and documents live in the cloud and are synchronized with all of your devices.
You can sync nearly any smartphone and any email app with Exchange Online as well so that you are never far from your appointments, contacts, and email. This feature is one of the most valuable. Not to mention that Outlook is one of the top-rated email apps for iPhones and Android phones.
Integrated Software
As we cover throughout the book, the Office 365 product is actually a suite of products that is hosted in the Microsoft data centers and accessed over the Inter- net. Microsoft has gone to great lengths to integrate the software as seamlessly as possible, which results in an increase in efficiency for users. For example, you might be performing a search for a document in your SharePoint portal. When you
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