The rise of cloud-based solutions (such as Office 365) are making it easier than ever for small-business teams to work together and communicate with clients. Here are a few ways in which you can use Office 365 to improve collaboration, productivity, and ROI for your business.
1. Co-Author Documents in Real Time With Office Online
Office Online allows multiple authors to work on documents together at the same time. Office Online saves changes automatically, so everyone sees the latest updated version of the document. Everyone sees the same fonts, layout, and formatting, no matter what browser or device each team member is using.
Related: The Benefits of Migrating Your Company to Office 365
This consistency can help to avoid people wasting time trying to sort out inconsistencies in formatting or working on an outdated version of a document.
2. Delve Deeper With Delve
Delve is a tool that allows you to quickly and easily look up employee profiles and curate useful content. You can view all the information you need in one place, helping you prepare to work with other team members. Quickly look up the people you need for your project and find out right away how to get in touch with them.
3. Automate Workflow With Flow
Microsoft Flow is designed to help businesses automate their workflows. In today’s digital age, employees use a huge number of apps and services every day. Flow brings all these tasks together into a well-designed workflow that allows everyone to know what they need to do at all times. When you have clear workflows, your business can operate more efficiently, which boosts your organization’s overall productivity and ROI.
4. Store Files in the Cloud With OneDrive for Business
One of the most important parts of Microsoft’s Office 365 is OneDrive for Business. This is a place where you can store files and share them with your staff. Every time an employee makes changes to a document, the content automatically syncs so that everyone has access to the latest version.
Related: Private, Public and Hybrid Cloud: Which is Best for You?
If you want only a subset of employees to have access to a document, you can set the permissions to only allow certain people to view or edit the files.
5. Plan Ahead With Planner
Planner allows teams and individual employees to manage their everyday work. They can define tasks that need to be completed, assign particular tasks to individual team members, set due dates, and update their statuses to let everyone know their progress.
Related: 5 SaaS Technologies You Should Be Using
Planner features clear and attractive dashboards to help people see at a glance what they need to do. Additionally, email notifications keep everyone on track. You can use Planner to brainstorm new product ideas, organize an event, or track progress on an important project.
6. Boost Teamwork With Microsoft Teams
Communication is the key to collaboration in small businesses. Because of this, Microsoft has introduced a chat-based workspace called Teams to Office 365 to facilitate communication. This tool integrates with all the other Office 365 applications, including Planner, Delve, and SharePoint. If you can get all your employees using Teams to discuss the projects they are working on, there could be significant benefits for your business.
All the conversations will be available to look back on, and they will all be stored in the same place. Conversations are all stored on a secure cloud server, so you do not need to worry about anyone getting access to information they should not have.
If you want to read more content, check out 5 Critical Steps for a VDI Migration