Office 365 is the brand name Microsoft uses for a group of subscriptions that provide productivity software and related services to businesses and consumers. The Office 365 service consists of a number of products and services which include Microsoft Office applications (Word, Excel, Powerpoint, Outlook, OneNote), collaboration tools (OneDrive, Sharepoint Online, Skype for Business, Yammer, Microsoft Teams) and cloud email hosting (Exchange).
The above products and services are used by all businesses – small and big – for their day to day work and productivity. As a business, if you are wondering if moving to Office 365 is really a solution for your business, the answer is yes. Although we can talk about “cooler features” that are available, as a business you probably say to yourself “I didn’t need any cool features up until now and my business is doing fine. Why do I need this now!”. That is why in this blog, we are going to talk about things you use right now in your business and how moving to Office 365 will help.
- Disaster Recovery Costs – As a business, you might be running some services like emails on an in-house server. If you are doing this, then you must have to worry about disasters like system crashes or natural disasters. To allow recovery from disasters, you must implement a disaster recovery plan, maintain it, change it as things change in the business and all of this just means “added cost”. By moving to a service like Office 365, you won’t have to worry about any of these costs as your data will always be available
- Predictable Costs – Office 365 allows you to pay for it’s services monthly and does not lock you into a contract. You can add, remove or reallocate licenses on demand. As a business owner, this means you can avoid large upfront costs for a new server or licenses
- Enterprise Email – A lot of businesses still use email services provided by their domain hosting company or internet service providers. The email service type is “POP3”. This email service type used to work in the old days when users were collecting emails only on one device (usually their office computer). With focus on mobility and remote workforce these days, users need to collect their emails on multiple devices (office computer, laptop, smart phones, tablets) and this is where a service like POP3 comes undone. POP3 service does not keep emails on all your devices in “sync” which means if an email is “read” on one device, it still shows up as “unread” on the second device. Another example is if you send an email from one device, it does not show up in the “sent items” of the second device. Office 365 hosted email service allows businesses of all sizes to make use of features that “enterprise” businesses have traditionally used. And again, with “no upfront costs”
- Licencing Nightmare – Traditionally businesses have bought software like Microsoft Office “as and when required”. This results in different users within a business using different versions of the software. This means situations like one user working on a file cannot collaborate with another user efficiently because “they use different versions of the software” are not uncommon. With Office 365, a business can ensure that all users are on the same version of the software and all updates are pushed to all users at the same time. As with any other product or service within Office 365, there is no upfront cost, only monthly costs
- Mix and Match Plans – Office 365 allows flexibility in terms of what products and services are made available to each user within a business. This means as a business, as an example, you do not have to buy “professional version” of Microsoft Office for everyone if only a few users need it. This can also be done with other software like Microsoft Project and Visio as well
The above are some of the “practical” examples that highlight how Office 365 can help a business of any size keep up with technology and improve their day to day working as well as productivity.
If you wish to know more if Office 365 is right for your business, please feel free to call us on 1300 441 551 for a free consultancy session.
