Get the Most Out of Office 365

Get the Most Out of Office 365

Office 365 is an advanced and sophisticated office suite of applications available from Microsoft that is full of features designed to enable businesses to increase productivity and improve daily operations. While Office 365 can drastically improve the way in which your company operates, it can be a challenging process to integrate the software into your business’s everyday workflow. Because Office 365 is a comprehensive office productivity platform and new capabilities are consistently being added, each of your employees should have access to initial and on-going training on Office 365 to become knowledgeable about the software and its capabilities.

Here are 6 applications in Office 365 that you should take advantage of:

1. Teams

Microsoft Teams is an Office 365 application designed to enable a collaborative workspace. Microsoft Teams enables employees to communicate with each other in a productive, positive, and conducive manner while providing transparency and accountability around conversations and work activity. Microsoft Teams is an off-shoot of Microsoft Groups, which allows for departments within a business to work together in a more fluid and productive manner using the power of Office 365. When you create a team, each project gets a dedicated space so that employees can seamlessly work together, complete their task on time. Within the same application, your employees will be able to chat with each other, share files and simultaneously work on documents.

2. OneDrive

OneDrive for Business is a cloud-based file sharing and syncing application included with all Office 365 packages. OneDrive lets a document be created on a tablet, edited on a desktop, and then finalized on a laptop. Using OneDrive, you can access your documents from anywhere, which means you can also work on and save your documents from anywhere, creating a productive and flexible environment. If you’re at a cafe or a hotel (be careful of the open wifi) and your partner is working from the office, you can access, make changes to, and save document simultaneously. If you lose internet access for a while, OneDrive has a “Sync Offline” feature too.

3. Microsoft Planner

Another up and coming application is Microsoft Planner. Once a Planner is created, the Owner of the Group can create the “buckets”, and after that any member of the Group can create tasks that need to be accomplished to complete the objectives of the Planner. You can attach files to tasks and have sub tasks that are part of a main task. Planners can be customized for each Group or project. It’s easy to reassign tasks if an individual’s role changes or if they move to a different project or Group. The tasks for the Group are viewable by all members of the Group, allowing for transparency that enables Planner members to work together collectively.

4. Power BI

Microsoft’s Power BI is a business intelligence tool in the Office 365 suite of applications. Power BI enables you to automate data extraction, transformation, loading and visualization, which will save you time and help ensure accuracy. Using Power BI your team will be able to connect with your data, build powerful reports, create meaningful dashboards, and share those across your organization easily. Being part of the Office 365 ecosystem, it makes it all the easier to connect your applications with Power BI. Power BI enables you to create a framework that you can build upon. You can use Power BI to help standardize reporting and improve organization-wide knowledge sharing.

5. Sway

Microsoft Sway helps in producing interactive reports and presentations with a number of customizations like narrations and audio recordings. Sway lets you convey concepts quickly, easily and clearly and lends itself well for content such as tutorials, topic introductions and interactive reports. Sway presentations are backed up to the cloud, and can be easily shared or embedded in websites. Microsoft Sway has an interesting feature, naming, the viewers count feature. To use this feature, you need to create and keep your presentation on the web using Sway for everyone to view and this will help you to see how many people viewed your file.

6. Secure Sharing

When a document is created and stored in OneDrive for business, OneDrive users have the ability, with IT oversight, to share content when and where it is appropriate. Access can be granted or revoked to specific users at any time during the lifespan of the document. By having the ability to revoke access on demand, your business’s information is more secure than sharing with a usb drive.

Microsoft’s Office 365 suite of integrated applications allows your organization to streamline essential business functions. Meeting business challenges and driving business growth has never been easier than through Microsoft’s suite of products, for many companies, this potential is simply not being met. ZCloudnova assists businesses with Office 365 migrations and licensing, Azure consulting and licensing, SharePoint implementations and support, Microsoft Exchange online, cloud services, and Power BI.

If you’re not utilizing the capabilities of your Microsoft O365 licensing to their fullest, take some time to explore how your company can adopt more of the tools already have access to. Your Account Manager will be able to help you if have any questions or simply need help. You’ll discover opportunities for your team to become more efficient and able to closely collaborate on projects and the tasks at hand.