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Why Office 365 is a valuable resource for your business

By 123 Reg - October 11, 2019

As one of the most widely used cloud productivity suites, with Gartner reporting over 155 million business users in 2018, there’s no doubt you’ve used Office 365 at some point in your life. Whether you’re drafting a letter in Word, compiling a spreadsheet in Excel or building a presentation in PowerPoint, Office 365 undoubtedly plays an important role in the everyday running of a business.

However, as good as these applications are, they only represent a fraction of Office 365’s capabilities. That’s why we’ll be discussing how Office 365’s suite of integrated solutions can be a powerful and essential resource for your business, boosting your productivity as well as helping your employees to collaborate on tasks more effectively.

Boost productivity

One of the best features of Office 365 is that it offers online versions of their most popular products – Word, Excel, PowerPoint and OneNote. As such, you can easily create and edit documents from anywhere in the world, without having to install any additional software.

In addition to these well-known applications, there are also a few bespoke products available. In particular, MileIQ provides accurate and automatic mileage tracking from your device – and can even provide detailed reports of your driving trips – while Microsoft Invoicing can generate custom invoices and estimates that match your company’s branding, helping to simplify an otherwise mundane and intricate task.

However, one of the biggest banes of productive employees is undoubtedly sending and storing large files. Thankfully, Office 365 has a solution to this in the form of OneDrive, allowing you to securely store and access documents from any location thanks to Microsoft’s Cloud Storage solution. With an impressive 1TB of storage available, you can easily share files by sending a link via email, text or Facebook, and can even access files without being online.

If all that wasn’t enough, due to the integrated nature of its apps, Office 365 can save up to 30 minutes of productivity loss per day and increase revenue by up to 33%. What’s more, software updates are free and are deployed straight from the cloud, ensuring that you always have the latest version installed.

Improved communication

Reliable communication tools are an invaluable asset for any successful business, as businesses with connected employees could see productivity rise by 20-25%. Co-ordinating your appointments can be a particularly time-consuming task, especially when it comes to the toing and froing of correspondence. Fortunately, Microsoft Bookings offers a quick and easy way for users to schedule appointments, allowing them to choose a time that’s best for them. What’s more, it can help to reduce the amount of missed appointments by automatically sending reminder emails, further reducing the unnecessary waste of your business’ time and resources.

Following on from this, even something as simple as managing emails is bolstered by Office 365, as Outlook allows you to access your emails across multiple devices. Since 85% of employees rely on more than one device at work,[2] this tool effectively allows employees to work on-the-go from anywhere.

However, by far the most powerful communications tool at Office 365’s disposal is Microsoft Teams. With over 500,000 businesses using the platform – including 91% of the Fortune 100 – Teams allows employees to host meetings with users across multiple locations, using secure and reliable chat, video and voice tools. Available in 181 markets, along with support for more than 40 languages, it’s easy to see why so many large, international businesses have taken it on-board.

Collaboration made easy

There’s nothing worse than working for days on a hefty task, only to find that it’s not what the client asked for. If this sounds familiar, you’re certainly not the only one as 86% of employees cite ineffective communication or a lack of collaboration as a major role in workplace failures.

To help combat this, Microsoft Planner allows you to create a flexible work board, populated with simple tasks and plans that extend towards an overarching goal. Compatible across all devices, you can easily assign and organise jobs, share files and discuss tasks, helping to avoid any confusion or misinterpretation among your employees.

Furthermore, another great collaborative tool that Office 365 has to offer is SharePoint: a web-based platform that allows multiple users to securely work on documents at the same time. You can also see each other’s changes in real-time, allowing teams to seamlessly synchronise their work. With all this in mind, incorporating Office 365 into your business can help take it to the next level and maximise your online potential.

You can learn more about everything Office 365 has to offer here. If you have any questions or need more advice on growing your business, please leave us a comment below.

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