4 ways business users can benefit from Office 365
By: Daniel Roberge, President, Nonlinear Enterprise
Between its cost saving capabilities and the ease and flexibility for your users, many organizations are embracing Microsoft’s Office 365.
Most often, when talking about business benefits of “going to the cloud,” the benefits cited centre around IT-focused benefits and for good reason. The cost savings in infrastructure and the ability to reallocate head count to more value-added functions have the potential to be large indeed. However, there are end-user benefits to certain cloud solutions as well. Microsoft’s Office 365 suite, for example, offers several improvements and benefits for end users. Here are just four.
1) Flexible access to the Office business suite
Many organizations purchase Office 365 to address their business applications needs: documents, spreadsheets, presentations and email tools. For those employees who have been working with Microsoft Office for many years, Office 365 is an easy transition that expands the legacy Microsoft Office experience to include multi-platform accessibility (desktop, laptop, tablet) giving you the freedom to work from anywhere you have an internet connection.
A word of caution when the business team is considering the purchase of Office 365: more than once, we have come across situations where the IT department has already purchased the full suite but has yet to fully deploy it, choosing instead to launch a few features as opposed to the complete product. Once the communications line are cleared and business and IT are on the same page, full deployment will give users the free to extend their base office tools, allowing them to work, share and collaborate with remote colleagues, customers and partners.
2) Convenient access to files with Skydrive Pro
SkyDrive Pro, an integral part of Office 365, is your personal cloud library for storing and organizing your work documents. SkyDrive Pro lets you work within the context of your organization, with features such as file syncing between computers and direct access to your organization’s address book. All files stored in Skydrive Pro are initially private until you decided to make them public by sharing them with others, a common practice when working on a communal project. From a technical perspective, Skydrive Pro libraries are provided through your subscription of SharePoint Online in Office 365 and allow your company’s IT team to control lifecycle and versioning, manage permissions and protect against data disasters.
3) Team collaboration with SharePoint Online
If you are familiar with the on-premise versions of SharePoint 2007 and 2010 (yes we know the interface and functionality left a lot to be desired, but SharePoint Online is great improvement), then you will appreciate how SharePoint can very quickly empower anyone to quickly create, store, manage and share content with team members. With SharePoint Server technology now in the cloud, SharePoint Online can help users manage and share personal documents and insights with colleagues, keep teams in sync with shared document libraries, task lists and calendars and stay up to date with company information and news. Public and private facing websites can also be created to share documents and insights securely with customers and partners or help in marketing your business to your customers.
One of the immediate benefits of implementing SharePoint Online for any organization is the ability to instantaneously implement a reliable corporate records/information management system. I’m not suggesting that SharePoint Online is your ticket to a full blown Records Management System (you may remember that we covered that a few weeks ago), but for many organizations it can very well be fit the bill. With the proliferation of content in all of its forms, organizations are in need of solutions that go beyond personal storage locations or corporate shared drives. With a bit of planning and implementation know-how, organizations can quickly put in place a content metadata strategy and governance structure to bolster their SharePoint Online sites that will give them a dependable content “findability” solution.
4) Enabling the social enterprise
One of the most intuitive tools of the Office 365 suite is Lync Online. Lync Online instantly connects people from your organization and beyond as part of their everyday productivity experience. Lync provides a consistent, single client experience for presence — including photos, availability status, and location combined with instant messaging, voice and video for a great meeting experience. Instead of sending an email and waiting for a response to a quick query, users can instantly touch base with others either through an instant chat or quick video call. You can also very easily conduct instant audio or video meetings by inviting others with the simple click of a mouse.
Microsoft’s acquisition of Yammer serves as a logical extension of MS’ presence in the social enterprise space. Yammer is a private social network typically deployed within an organization that helps you get connected to the right people, share information across teams, and organize around projects. One might argue that Lync and SharePoint already do this, however, Microsoft believes that a complete corporate solution will see content being created using Office and stored on SharePoint, with Lync and Yammer driving collaboration and discussions around said content. The integration of Yammer into the rest of Office 365 is not complete, but it is worth mentioning that Microsoft will be working hard to ensure it becomes seamless with future feature releases of Office 365.
If you are an organization that is already benefiting from Office 365, it might be worth considering enhancing your cloud experience by turning on the collaboration, storage, search and project workspace features of your existing Office 365 investment. If you don’t own these tools then reach out to Nonlinear to figure out your options and start building a richer collaboration and content creation experience.
This post first appeared on the Nonlinear Enterprise Blog.
