Making the most of your Office 365 subscription

Businesses are taking to the cloud with increasing frequency as mobile workforces take preference over traditional office environments.  Having the ability for employees to have secure access to corporate data wherever they work from has gone from an added benefit, to a demand in today’s business landscape.  Products like Office 365 from Microsoft are continually evolving to become a “All in One” solution for business productivity in and out of the office.

Over the years, Office 365 have developed from a cloud exchange environment to a complete collaboration platform.  With additions and enhancements to SharePoint online, Groups, Teams, and other Office 365 applications, Office 365 can help organizations be more productive than ever.  One of the challenges we see facing organizations is developing a strategy and implementation plan for using all that Office 365 has to offer.  Here are some of the applications that our clients are using to be more collaborative and productive.

Planner:

Planner is a task management application that allows groups to create plans, assign tasks, share files, and collaborate on what has been accomplished.  Planner used to only be available as a web application, but is not available for iOS and Android devices.  Planner creates a board for each plan.  In the plan, you can organize tasks into buckets and categorize tasks by who they are assigned to or status.  Check out a little more on Planner here

Flow:

Microsoft Flow is an automation application that helps automate workflows between applications.  At is basic level, Flow takes an output from one program, website, ect and then takes an action on another application.  Flow tasks can be as simple as automating emails to people that like you on Facebook or pull data from incoming emails and import that into an excel spreadsheet.  Flow continually evolves with additional API’s and applications it is compatible with to help automate your daily business tasks.  Check out more about Flow here

Teams:

Microsoft Teams may be the most exciting application added to Office 365.  Teams, like it’s competitor Slack, is a collaborative chat based application.  Teams allows you to have individual or group chats that can be used as a replacement for internal email clutter, or create Teams and Channels for department or project collaboration.  Teams ties into Office 365 Groups, SharePoint, and Skype for Business to provide file storage, video chat and conference options, and real time collaboration on projects.  Take a deeper look at Microsoft Teams here

This only scratches the surface at what Office 365 offers in addition to world class enterprise email and file application in SharePoint online and Exchange Online.  For as little as $5 per user per month, Office 365 can replace the need for on site server for many companies while making your workforce more agile and adaptive.  Give us a call to see how we can help you get set up in Office 365 or help you take advantage of what you already have as an Office 365 customer.