6 Reasons to Move to Microsoft Office 365

2015 is the right time for you to plan to upgrade to the latest version of Microsoft Office, Office 365. I have not been a proponent of Office 365 until recent changes by Microsoft—including adding value and lowering prices. The value is higher by such an extent that it makes sense to move to Office 365 for almost every home user and most small-business users. Even larger organizations should be looking at Office 365, although the decision becomes a little less obvious the larger you are.

Office itself is not much of a reason to upgrade, as the apps themselves have a learning curve and don't add a ton of value compared to Office 2013. In 2015, I expect Microsoft to continue to add more value into Office 365, as well as release additional features to make the upgrade more compelling.

In general, these are the basic reasons you should move to Office 365 in 2015:

1. Professionally hosted email

Microsoft Exchange has the best feature set for business class email, and if you have more than two users, you will love the calendar sharing. Exchange hosting is included in Office 365, and eliminates headaches associated with upgrades, space and other issues involved in hosting your own Exchange server. Users get 50 GB of storage included—which is more than enough for most people. Even for enterprises, the cost makes sense to move to Exchange in the cloud and reduce headaches.

2. One terabyte of cloud hosted files included

I'm a Dropbox user and fan mostly because it is easy and works everywhere. But one terabyte on Dropbox is $99 per year, so why not have Microsoft OneDrive and Office for $150 a year? Microsoft OneDrive works on all devices just like Dropbox, and works really well with Microsoft applications.