■ Creating Your Office 365 Account

The first step in accessing the wonders behind the Office 365 curtain involves creating your own account. Begin by going to www.office365.com to sign up. The first question Office 365 will ask you is to decide whether you want to use the Small Business version or the Enterprise version of Office 365. This book focuses on the features you’ll find in the Small Business version, which gives you everything you need for creating a team site, sharing documents, working with email and instant messaging, hosting online meetings, and more. The Enterprise version is designed for larger organizations that have sophisticated data needs and require advanced archiving and Active Directory capabilities. After you choose Small Business, Office 365 presents you with a simple form to fill out. You provide your name and Windows Live ID (and you can sign up for one during this process if you don’t already have one), and then you pass muster by typing the validation key and clicking OK. When you click Continue, Office 365 lets you know that it will send your new user name and password to the email address you specified. The Office 365 home page then appears, and one by one the various services that are part of Office 365 begin to load. (See Figure 2-1.)

FIGURE 2-1 After you sign up for Office 365, the program begins to load your software services.

Tip You’ll see the note, “This may take a few minutes…” only the first time you access Office 365. After the services are added to your account, you won’t have this kind of wait time again.