Collaboration in Office 365–The Possibilities

Posted out on Microsoft’s TechNet blog I found an article discussing things that you can do to within the Office 365 environment that allows for different kinds of data sharing with both internal users (those users who are part of your Microsoft Office 365 tenant) and external users (those that belong to other Office 365 tenants).

What is an Office 365 tenant?

The term “tenant” is purely technical. In an ideal scenario, a single company would sign up for a single Office 365 tenant. Imagine a tenant as an equivalent of a closed on premise setup within which you have all your services running.

A single tenant will have all your users, groups, resources, data, subscriptions, licenses etc.

But we have also seen companies going for multiple tenants – especially if they have entities that are (or need to be) “separate” either from an IT or legal perspective.

Even then we would normally recommend having a single tenant for a single company, wherever possible. Why? Because tenant boundaries limit collaboration capabilities and bring in (IT) barriers between two users that you would normally expect to have between users in two separate companies (or organizations). Your global IT administrator’s credentials are effective only within the tenant boundaries. And, if you own a vanity domain name (like “Microsoft.com”) – you can only use it in a single tenant of Office 365, i.e. users in two separate tenants cannot have email addresses or login addresses ending with the same domain name.

The article provides a lot of insight and ideas on how to use your Office 365 account, and if you haven’t taken the leap yet, this may provide some ideas of why you should.