As the CEO of an SMB, I recognize that one of our greatest assets is tapping the knowledge of our employees.  On any given day each employee may deal with up to 15-20 individual customers, 3-5 vendors, 10-15 fellow employees, and 3-5 strategic partners.  That’s as many as 540 unique interactions per day! Sound familiar?  When I talk to other CEOs this is not an uncommon problem – and if you think that just one or two of these interactions produce some bit of information that would be useful for the entire team – there’s a lot of data that would be useful for the entire team to leverage.

It’s no secret that we (PTG) are big fans of Microsoft’s Cloud offering, Office 365.  It brings together really awesome technology on a single platform – SharePoint Online for collaboration, Lync for real-time messaging with employees and partners, and Exchange for enterprise class messaging, calendaring, and tasks. Clearly we are a little biased as a Microsoft Tier 3 Cloud Champion (Microsoft’s top designation for Cloud partners) and Cloud Accelerate Partner – but I decided to write a series of blog posts on why I love Office 365 as a CEO of any small business – not necessarily a technology company.  What most folks don’t know about me is that I am really not a techie – and that’s the position I will take in these posts.  How does Office 365, with the tools that I use everyday, help me get my job done as the CEO?

I recently started sharing my calendar on Office.com. I want to be able to share that - but don't necessarily want to put it in my email auto-signature. I found myself often looking for the link to share with someone so I could drop it into my email - what a pain. (I had saved it in a memo in Outlook)

Great KB here on the features/comparison of the SharePoint online variations in Office 365.
http://support.microsoft.com/kb/2411918

If you are using BPOS/Office365 and have a need to have 1 distribution group that includes 2 separate domains (ie: sales@acme.com and sales@acmeinc.com), you may have seen that it causes a bit of a problem - you get an error message that the 'email address already exists'.