Lawliet (and all)- thanks very much for your assistance and feeback. No, I'm not confused, but we've concluded that there are just too many 'workarounds' needed to use Office 365 as it is today. Our current setup-- Office 2011on our Macs, Office 2012/13 on our PCs, DropBox and IMAP email accounts-- is relatively simple and seamless. The only drawback is that iCloud doesn't play well with windows any more than SkyDrive Pro does with OS X, but that's not a showstopper since we have third-party apps for contact and calendar syncs.
So, until more integrated Mac support is available for Office 365 I think we'll stay with what we have. -Eric