Office 365 is not just an upgrade to your email and office licenses…
Looking back at collaboration and productivity…
Technology has dramatically transformed the workplace of today. If you compare to just 10 years ago the difference in collaboration and productivity is vast.
The industrial revolution drove efficiency in businesses that allowed them to scale in a safe and efficient manner. Access to information was difficult and expensive in this era which often could only be accessed by giant corporations. This information then travelled in a top down approach in terms of collaboration, where in-house systems and tools focused on a “me-centric” model for productivity.
This approach no longer works in today’s world. We need to be quicker, leaner and more agile than ever before as there are multiple challenges affecting the ‘old’ approach.
A good example of something that is driving these changes is the impact that ‘Millennials’ have had on the workforce. It’s worth noting that by 2030, 75% of the workforce will be made up of millennials. (US Bureau of Labour Statistics)
Now some of you will be thinking well so what? So let’s talk about millennials in more depth.
Millennials have grown up surrounded by Smartphones, where information can be accessed at the touch of a button, social networks are the preferred method of communication and feedback on shared content is almost instant. To sum it up ‘instant and interactive technology’ that can be accessed from anywhere.
So if you want to get the best out of Millennials in your work place, would it not be best to give them similar tools?
Following the Millennials model, information would no longer be accessible for the selected few but for those who can make meaningful decisions from the information and drive better business outcomes in an instant.
Until now we have never had the ability or tools that allow us to truly measure how productive we are as a workforce. What if you and your manager could gain an insight into how you work and where you spend the majority of your time? This sounds a bit like Big Brother right? Keep reading and I will explain later why this would be good for us all….
Efficiency has always been important in terms of collaboration and productivity but that’s no longer enough as we have additional needs. We need the ability to communicate from anywhere at any time on any device and the agility to be productive in any environment whether in the office, on the train or sitting on the beach. These are now working essentials and are becoming key to employees and employers alike.
Where we are today…
There is one platform that I believe is really changing the way we work for the better and that is Office 365.
When I think of Office 365 there are some key areas that stick out that will only increase productivity and collaboration and I have highlighted a few examples below:
- Have you ever needed access a particular file that is on your work PC or Laptop but you’re on the move and with no access to either of them?
The solution:
• Office 365 contains OneDrive which allows you to store documents in a personal storage account — think of it like My Documents on your laptop
• Office 365 gives each user the ability to deploy to 5 devices e.g. the user’s laptop, mobile phone or tablet (MAC, Windows, IOS or Android)
• The user could access the required file via OneDrive on their personal mobile phone as this could be one of five devices that they could include.
2. Do you work in a business that uses a shared folder/server to store data such as employee’s documents, company files, team data etc. If so, are you constantly having to either upgrade storage on the server or worst case delete files to make room?
The solution:
• Office 365 comes with SharePoint which has 1TB of storage per tenant e.g. MyMateTech.net gets 1TB of storage as standard — after this each user on the tenant adds an additional 0.5TB of storage and more storage can be purchased from around 13p per GB.
• SharePoint online allows you to create team sites and access documents from anywhere on any device, with locked down access for particular users or open to everyone depending on what you want to share.
• SharePoint Online included in your O365 Business or Enterprise license and allows you to remove the need for that server and if you need more than 1TB of storage you can upgrade at minimal cost.
3. Think about a time when you have worked on a project with both internal and external resources. You all may not have the same access to the systems and tools that allow to communicate, therefore what do you do? Shared folders to save project documents (sometimes several versions of the same thing), continuous email exchanges with ‘up to date’ information, back and forth calls to create a joint project calendar? Then a new project member joins and to get them up to speed we give them access to the shared drive and send them the endless email exchanges to read through. Ever thought this just seems like a lot of effort?
The solution:
• Office 365 Groups allows you to work with your teammates in collaboration and in real time when writing a business, creating a forecasting spreadsheet or sending an email.
• When constructing a group in Office 365 it:
- Deploys a shared inbox for group communication
- Provisions a Group calendar for availability
- Implements a OneNote notebook for note taking and sharing
- Creates Planner for task management
- A SharePoint team site for the group content storage
- This is all at the touch of a button and contained within your Office 365 license
4. We’d all like to think we have a good understanding of where we spend our time, where our teams spend their time? But do we? What do we base that on? If we were able to clearly see what tasks took the majority of our time, what documents do we mostly use and where do we have any bottlenecks? What could we do with that information? Streamline work, identify additional resource, eliminate wasted time? The list is endless
The solution:
• An Office 365 E3 license would give you access to Delve
• Delve allows users, managers and leaders to understand where they spend most of their time — for example why would an acquisition sales executive spend 9 hours a day on their emails or why one of your support staff would spend 8 hours a day in meetings — Delve can give you this insight to train your staff and ensure they are working on the value add activities
• Delve can give users insight to popular documents based on personal, peers, teams or company wide criteria. You can search via Delve on keywords and any public available document with the keyword as the file name or if the keyword is in the document, Delve will retrieve all the relevant documents — information at your fingertips!
5. Have you ever experienced a time when you need to wait for someone else in the company to finish their part of the Word document or PowerPoint, send it to you and then the slow cycle of emailing back and forth until you have the final product?
The solution:
• Co-authoring in productivity applications in Office 365 such as Word, PowerPoint and Excel
• Collaborate in real time with the ability to view what others are typing at that particular point
• Documents are stored in SharePoint and OneDrive so you can co-author from anywhere at anytime
Review with a view
I can’t give a more biased review on Office 365 as if you’re not considering it now then make it the next project for your company.
Gone are the days of email and company documents being accessed from the office, gone are the days of only having one device to collaborate on — Office 365 lets you collaborate on any device from anywhere whilst still being productive online or offline.
Anyone can use the Office suite as it’s designed for ease of use to give simple outcomes for user. But where Office 365 adds to this is through Groups, OneDrive and SharePoint that have some added features to make collaboration seamless.
If we look at the ability to use applications such as Delve (mentioned above) currently top Enterprises business are buying part solutions from multiple resources just to get insight into their workforce habits. This is not cheap but Delve allows you to do it all and for a fraction of the price. No longer is this sort of insight only available for the business elite but for anyone who wants to improve business productivity regardless of company size.
MyMateTech’s Conclusion
Looking at the above I feel it’s clear to see that Office 365 has changed productivity and collaboration for the good. It is not a simple upgrade to your exchange mailbox or your Office applications it is however an upgrade and investment to your employee’s productivity and collaboration suite.
The added features and applications that Office 365 brings as standard to the license are great value adds compared to what we know as the norm today.
Businesses and IT Heads have been shaken over moving to Office 365 due to some outages it experienced during its first few years but gone are those days and Office 365 truly is an enterprise grade platform available to everyone.
I only touched on some of the highlights in this article and believe me there are many more, so stop thinking of Office 365 as an upgrade cost and start investing in the future of your business and most importantly your employees.
Collaboration and productivity is what makes businesses work and if you want to be at the forefront then let Office 365 be in the background setting you and your team up for success.
