Day 3 – Outlook Web App for Email
09/17/2014
30 Days with Office 365 for Educators – Day 3
For most of us email is a routine part of our day.
Office 365 offers the Outlook Web App as the default way to access email. I mentioned yesterday that many users of Office 365 will change the default Start Screen to log in directly to Outlook because we spend so much of our time there. Just remember that Office 365 is so much more than email.
The term Outlook can get confusing as it is used by Microsoft in different ways. There is the outlook.com website that is used to serve the free Office Online products for individuals using a Microsoft account. There is also a full version of the Outlook Client that is part of the familiar Microsoft Office Suite of applications.
The full Outlook Client requires installation on individual computers and additional setup to use with Office 365. The Outlook Client offers a full-featured set of functions for power users that are not available in the web app. While you can use the Outlook Client to connect to your Office 365 account the Outlook Client is beyond the scope of this blog post. Perhaps in later posts I will have more to say about the full-featured Outlook Client and Office 365.
For this post I will concentrate on the Outlook Web App to keep things simple. When you select the Outlook icon in Office 365 you will be taken to the Outlook Web App.
Simple can be good. The Outlook Web App, as the name implies, requires an Internet connection and a modern browser to utilize, that's it. The main benefit of this approach is that it allows you to easily be a “digital nomad” and use any computer that is connected to the Internet to log in to your Office 365 account. Once logged in you use the Outlook Web App interface to access your email.
Relying upon the cloud also reduces support costs because IT personnel do not have to individually install and manage a client on every single computer. This is a major reason why cloud computing services like Office 365 are gaining traction in many organizations, including EIU.
The Outlook Web App does not require any special client software to be loaded on the computer you use. Simply log in to your Office 365 account, select Outlook, and you are using your email. The downside is that if you do not have Internet access you cannot get to your email unlike the full-featured Outlook Client that stores a local copy of emails to the PC.
Office 365 comes with a 99.9% uptime guarantee so it is rare that you will run into a problem accessing Office 365. When downtime does occur it is usually short-lived.
Because you are using Office 365 in the cloud it is important that you get in the habit of ALWAYS ALWAYS ALWAYS SIGNING OUT OF YOUR ACCOUNT when you are finished. Always Sign Out and close the browser. This is particularly important at the university where faculty, staff, and students often use shared classroom/lab computers.
To Sign Out of your Office 365 account select the picture icon located in the upper-right corner of the blue task bar and select Sign Out.
Keep on Learning,
Tom Grissom, Ph.D.
@tomgrissom
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