No longer simply a suite, Microsoft Office365 has become an ever-expanding platform for organizational productivity, communication, and collaboration. Those focusing their careers on supporting Office365 environments need to ramp up on the roadmap and get ready for an exciting ride. With greater power comes greater responsibility.

They say things die when they stop changing. Latin, as a language, is considered dead because it hasn’t changed in centuries.

That being the case, Office 365 is alive and well.

Get Your Software Sneakers On

Those who remember way back to the introduction of the original Business Productivity Online Suite (BPOS) from Microsoft will immediately list Work, Excel, PowerPoint, Lync, Exchange, SharePoint, and some may even forget Outlook as the components of the suite. That was seven years ago in 2011, the year that Dynamics CRM was introduced online before it was released onprem, an historic event.

Looking at the user apps console today one will find all of the above plus Admin, Calendar, Delve, Dynamics 365, Flow, Forms, Newsfeed, OneDrive, OneNote, Partner, People, Planner, PowerApps, Security & Compliance, StaffHub, Store, Stream, Sway, Tasks, Teams, To-Do, Video, Yammer, Alignable, and Calendly.

But Wait, There’s More!

For those wishing to constantly keep up with all things Office 365, the Technet Blogs offer Office 365 Weekly, a constant flow of news about new features, functions, capacities, capabilities, and more value that is being added to Office 365 on a constant basis. Just in the past few weeks, headlines in the weekly blog have included:

• New Enhancements in Workplace Analytics
• Power BI GDPR Whitepaper is now available
• Delegate scheduling of Skype for Business meetings on Mac now available!
• Exchange Server 2013 Enters Extended Support Lifecycle Phase
• What's New in Microsoft Teams - April 2018 Update
• Announcing the new Microsoft Teams & Skype for Business Admin Center
• Announcing: Office 365 endpoint categories and Office 365 IP Address and URL web service
• New Stream Features - April 2018
• In June 2018, we're making changes to the native social capabilities in SharePoint Online
• Exchange Server TLS guidance Part 2: Enabling TLS 1.2 and Identifying Clients Not Using It
• Introducing the Microsoft 365 Security and Compliance Center
• A new architecture for Exchange hybrid customers enables Outlook mobile and security
• The Outlook for iOS and Android architecture is FedRAMP compliant for US Office 365 GCC customers
• Upcoming improvements to the Azure AD sign-in experience

And, yes, that’s just the last two weeks.

Office 365 Appreciation

Remember back in high school when you were encouraged to take “Music Appreciation” but couldn’t really figure out what it was?

They basically taught you everything you needed to know to better understand and appreciate what the musicians had to be able to do to perform the music you were listening to. You actually did appreciate the hard work that went into playing various types of music, or you slept through the course.

Now, if you want to achieve growth in your career and that career involves supporting Office 365, you’ll need to learn the fundamentals of managing such an environment. This will give you a fuller appreciation of the value of each new addition and how to counsel your users about them.

The good news is that all the fundamental courses, plus the intermediate and advanced ones that will accelerate the speed at which you can help your user community adopt each new Office 365 addition, are available at New Horizons Learning Centers. Call your New Horizons counsellor today to get moving on the foundation of your Office 365 education.  The list of new capabilities isn’t getting any shorter, so get moving!