Benefits of SharePoint Online

Following are the benefits of SharePoint Online :

1. New user interface (UI) :  

• Drag and drop.Now you can upload documents, pictures, and other types of files to your site by dragging them from your computer to a library on your site, such as Documents or your SkyDrive Pro library. 

• On-hover. Use this new callout feature with any document in a library or from within search results to see a set of rich commands and contextual information. You can open, share, or follow documents, view a document preview, and use Deep links to jump directly to content inside a document. 
• A key investment area across all of the products in the new Office, large touch targets make it easy for you to filter, navigate, and work with documents–increasing accessibility across devices, big and small.
• aSyncronous calls. Refresh the content you want to focus on. List and library navigation and filtering means fewer full-page refreshes–less time waiting, more time doing.
• Office Web Apps edit. Now available to everyone–even those you invite via External Sharing can edit Office documents on your behalf in the browser. You can know with confidence that your collaborators have the best tools to help you build your business.
• Universal Office 365 top navigation. Now you can find your way without having to remember (or bookmark) how to get there. And it’s all in a simplified, single browser experience–no pop ups, no feeling lost.

2. SkyDrive Pro :  SkyDrive Pro is cloud storage for employees that is now a core part of SharePoint Online.  SkyDrive Pro is intended to  meet your usage criteria and provide organizational control. Everyone who has use rights to a Personal Site (what used to be called “My Sites”) gets SkyDrive Pro, along with 7GB of personal storage quota–that’s increased from 500MB. Personal sites are available within more Office 365 plans than before

With SkyDrive Pro, employees can:

• Sync and share documents
• Collaborate on documents with individuals both inside and outside of their organization
• Access content and information anywhere and from a multitude of devices

… while admins can:

• Control content lifecycle and versioning
• Protect against data loss and perform eDiscovery
• Manage access permissions

3. Yammer
4. Guest Links :  External Sharing just got better. Now you can share sites, folders, and individual documents with the new Guest Links feature that enables users to invite others from inside and outside the company to collaborate on individual Office documents. To share and collaborate, guests enter a username and password, or they can use  anonymous co-authoring.  In addition, you can control the contributions by the permission level you choose to grant. You might want some users to have Read permission, while others have permission to Write. You can also revoke sharing at any time.

5. New and improved Public Website :
The public website in SharePoint Online includes a new design and new features for customizing the site and individual pages. Because the website is built on the SharePoint platform, you now get publishing capabilities, more Web parts (social media add-ins, blogging and commenting, new Apps for SharePoint from the Office Store), SEO property options and advanced design options. Now you also can disable the public website so that it’s not visible on the Internet until you choose it to be. This is useful when the site is under construction or in rare cases when the website must be taken offline. Simply enable your website when you’re ready for it to go back online.
If you want to completely redesign the website from scratch or use a design you already have, you can use the Design Manager. This set of features lets you turn a conventional HTML web page into a SharePoint master page with page layouts, mobile views, cascading style sheets, and more. You can use your own website editing tools (like Adobe DreamWeaver^TM) to do the design work before uploading the files to SharePoint Online’s Design Manager–no need to be a SharePoint expert.
6. eDiscovery
7. Site Mailbox : Combine SharePoint Online’s document management strengths with Exchange Online’s powerful email solutions and you get Site Mailboxes – powerful project-based “inboxes” that help teams organize project-related content and email into a single view, while everything is preserved in its original location as documents in SharePoint Online and email in Exchange Online.
You can access Site Mailboxes through Outlook 2013 as well as SharePoint Online. If you don’t have Outlook 2013, you can view the same content from the SharePoint Online site that loads in a site-specific Outlook Web App. Only those with permission to the project site can view the Site Mailbox.
8. Enterprise search
9. Cloud app model (CAM)
10. PowerShell for SPO
11. Storage and file upload improvements

Using SharePoint Online instead of trying to build and manage the platform with your own organization’s resources gives you a number of benefits. You simply sign up, pay a monthly licensing fee, and access SharePoint over the Internet.

The advantage of SharePoint Online is that you don’t have to worry about the various costs of hosting and managing your own gear. The price you pay for SharePoint Online covers everything, including the data center. Therefore organizations have to no more worry about :
 infrastructure, support, maintenance, and upgrades .

For using SharePoint you  have to take into account the operating systems and associated software such as the web servers, databases, and SharePoint itself that run on the server computers.The Microsoft platform uses the Windows Server operating system, the Internet Information Service (IIS) web server, and the SQL Server database. All these software systems are just the supporting actors for the SharePoint software itself. The amount of time and resources it takes to get all these software components installed, updated, and configured can be daunting.When you sign up for SharePoint Online, you don’t have to worry about installing and managing the software components that make up the SharePoint platform. Microsoft takes care of all of that for you, and it’s all included in the price.

Microsoft also monitors the servers and logs 24 hours a day in order to make sure nothing goes awry. The monitoring takes place in Network Operation Centers.

The SharePoint on-premise  platform itself needs to have a backup and disaster recovery plan, in addition to being available, redundant, and secure.With SharePoint Online, the Microsoft teams take care of all this for you, and it’s guaranteed in the contract. With the hardware, software, and plans in place, you as a customer are free to focus on developing business solutions on the platform instead of working through the process of setting everything up yourself.