The Difference Between SharePoint Online and Office 365

If you are unacquainted to the world of Document Management Systems, SharePoint, Enterprise Level Content Management (ECM) System; then you might have heard about Office 365 or SharePoint Online interchangeably. There is a common contradiction between Office 365 and SharePoint Online that they both share similar capabilities; but to accurately decide on that one needs to understand the differences between them. In this blog post, we have listed down all the fundamental differences between Microsoft Office 365 and SharePoint Online, that will help you make you understand them better.

SharePoint Explained!

Let’s begin with understanding SharePoint. SharePoint is an enterprise-level collaborative platform created and managed by Microsoft, and it has been over 19 years, SharePoint has been ruling the corporate world. Formerly, SharePoint was only considered to be an intranet tool which also allowed employees to attain better internal collaboration. Primarily, SharePoint development was only used as a Document Management System, but what actually set it apart from other such systems was its capability to share and organize different content types too such as tasks, events, announcements, links etc. But now, SharePoint is considered to be a one-stop shop for sharing and managing any type of information within your organization; mainly because of the fact that SharePoint has changed throughout these years in terms on look, feel and most importantly functionality. And, the most drastic change occurred, when SharePoint became the part of Microsoft Office 365.

What Is Office 365?

One of the very crucial development took place in 2011-2012 in the world of IT, when Microsoft decided to take its application to the cloud. It was quite the trend back in those days, as a lot of companies were embarking upon the cloud decisions. Hence, Microsoft decided to do the same. This means that all the applications created by Microsoft will be able to run through Microsoft’s cloud servers and can be easily accessed via websites. This also made organizations less bound to buy hardware or install software over their physical servers. This decision has made all the Microsoft software available at any computer system or digital device simply with the use of an internet connection and browser.

Additionally, Microsoft bundled all its good applications such as MS Outlook, MS Word, MS PowerPoint, MS Excel, Skype, MS Teams, SharePoint etc. and named it as the Microsoft Office 365 Suite.