10 Ways of Leveraging Office 365 to Increase Your Company's Productivity

Considering the high speed of business in today’s fast-paced world, a company’s success is directly tied to its peoples’ productivity. A considerable financial strain on your business may result from employees unable to work as productively as they should or could.

Fortunately, many technologies exist to aid in combating this problem. Increasingly, we are seeing these technologies migrate to the cloud which offers additional cost savings to businesses of all sizes. Office 365 from Microsoft is a popular software suite that can help boost productivity in your workplace in numerous meaningful ways. Here’s 10:

1. Easy Collaboration

Working with Office 365 facilitates improved communications within your organization, and with the outside world. Office 365’s comprehensive shared, and individual calendars and coctacts—staples of Outlook—offer best-in-class communications and organisational management tools.

OneDrive, Outlook and SharePoint are prime examples of applications that allow employees to work on projects with one another, exchange files and documents quickly, easily, and reliably no matter where they might be in the world. This makes it possible for employees to collaborate with freelancers, vendors, off-site support and co-workers who are out in the field while still on the clock.

2. Your Office on the Go

As mobile technology evolves, remote work is becoming increasingly popular. Much of today’s workforce is looking for ways breach the walls the physical office. Whether this is working from home throughout the week or catching up on tasks after-hours, people want access to their work-related data no matter where they are, as and when they need it.

Office 365 incorporates an extremely powerful mobile solution that integrates with a variety of mobile devices including laptops, tablets and smartphones. Applications can be installed on up to five devices per user, which means people can access their Word, Excel and other documents to get work done when and wherever they are.

The mobile experience is fully functional and seamlessly intuitive to anyone familiar with the desktop counterparts. The mobile version of Word was used to write the copy in this paragraph, with track changes enabled, and making use of iOS features like dictation. This alone empowers increased productivity for anyone to looking capitalize on creativity when and where it strikes.

3. Simple Communication

Effective and efficient communication is the cornerstone of productivity. Office 365 offers a variety of options to ensure people can speak in real time without having to meet face-to-face, including:

• Microsoft Exchange Online coupled with Outlook

• Instant messaging

• Video chat

• Skype for Business.

These tools empower collaboration making it possible no matter where you are.

4. Cloud-Based Storage

Increasingly companies are migrating to the cloud to meet their storage requirements, and to meet security and accessibility targets.

Office 365’s OneDrive for business allows employees to upload documents to the cloud, enabling them to work from anywhere without creating multiple, duplicate files. With an active internet connection or the relevant mobile app installed on a smartphone, your people will have access to the latest versions of every document they need.

5. Downtime & TCO Reduction

Downtime is the enemy of every business. In the past, outages and disruptions would prevent people from working for hours, even longer in the event of costly server failures. With Office 365, everything is in the cloud and accessible on multiple devices, which means that people will always have access to their work. Office 365 helps safeguard your critical data with geo-redundant, enterprise-grade reliability and disaster recovery, with multiple data centres and automatic failovers and a strict privacy policy. Office 365 is designed to deliver reliability, availability, and performance with a guaranteed 99.9% uptime, financially backed service level agreement (SLA). Furthermore, your business will lower the total cost of ownership (TCO), no longer needing to budget for costly hardware like exchange servers and the IT staff to manage them.

6. Familiar Tools

Microsoft Office has been a prominent, best-in-class business tool for decades and the various flavours of Office 365 represent the next level in its evolution. The vast majority of people are familiar with Office, PowerPoint, Excel, Exchange, Publisher and the many other components of the Office suite. This significantly decreases the learning curve that comes with transitioning to Office 365.

7. Corporate Social Network

The system even allows users to create their own private social network with Yammer. This makes communication and collaboration even easier. Everyone on the team will be able to have access to this private network.

8. Safety and Security

Security is a priority at Microsoft data centres. With Office 365, you leverage the same systems used by Microsoft and other enterprises worldwide to protect email, documents, and networks. These systems scan your messages and documents for spam and malicious software and malware 24 hours a day, 7 days a week. Microsoft data centres help safeguard your data and are certified to meet multiple industry-standard certifications.

9. Scaleability

Your Office 365 solution grows as your company grows.

Provisioning new seats to accommodate new hires is quick and easy. Adding greater data and storage capacity to meet the needs of your expanding corporate record and intellectual property is also easy, convenient and secure. As your company’s needs change so too is your O365 plan malleable.

10. Unlimited Resources

Office 365 is a veritable industry standard by means of its pedigree; it is, after all, Microsoft Office. The resources available online and in print are extensive and exhaustive. No user need waste any time finding the help or answers they need to accomplish well-nigh anything in Office 365. You are not alone as an O365 user.

Coming soon to this blog… a series of Office 365 primers: 10 Tips to Streamline your Workflow in Outlook, Word, Excel, PowerPoint and Access. Stay tuned! Or subscribe to stay in the loop

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INTECH Computer Solutions Inc. is a certified Microsoft Partner Network member and a Microsoft Cloud Solutions Provider.

We’d be happy to field any questions, concerns or comments you may have about Microsoft Cloud-Based technologies like the Office 365 suites.

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