How Office 365 helps enhance business productivity

Business owners go to great lengths to increase office productivity. They minimize distractions, cut unnecessary meetings, and create to-do lists. But they also need dependable tools that will help employees work faster and smarter. Microsoft Office 365 offers a suite of applications designed to do just that. Here are several ways it can enhance business productivity.

Remote access

Office 365 is a cloud-based productivity suite, meaning the platform isn’t actually installed on local servers and workstations. Instead, it’s housed in Microsoft’s servers and can be accessed via the internet. In other words, Office 365 apps like Word, Excel, and Skype for Business are available to you on any internet-connected device, including mobile phones, tablets, and laptops.

When you give employees the tools and the flexibility to work wherever they want, you get a serious efficiency boost. With Office 365, workers no longer need to commute to the office and can choose to work in environments conducive to their creativity and productivity. Studies also show that remote workers have lower stress levels and higher morale, both of which play a major role in increasing overall performance levels.

Collaboration features

The most well known feature in Office 365 is real-time co-authoring. With it, you and other authorized users can access and work on the same Word, Excel, and PowerPoint file. You can even initiate Skype calls within the shared document, which is helpful for when you need immediate feedback from your colleagues.

Apart from co-authoring, Office 365 also offers other apps to get your employees to work together. For instance, Office 365 Groups aggregates all team messages into a shared inbox and calendar to make it easy to schedule meetings and keep everybody on the same page. There’s also Office 365 Planner that lets you coordinate projects by assigning tickets to individual members of your team.

Communications

Needless to say, good communication is imperative when it comes to productivity and Office 365 gives you tools to communicate with employees and stakeholders no matter where you are, including:

• Skype for Business - a unified communication platform complete with instant messaging, VoIP, video chat, and web conferencing features.
• Microsoft Teams - a collaboration app that allows teams to chat, share files, organize projects, and set up meetings.

Familiar tools

Office 365 comes with all the apps you know and love. So, if your company is experienced with tools like Outlook, Word, Excel, and OneNote, you won’t need additional software training. Even if there are new features, Office 365 has an intuitive user interface that helps you find the functions you want quickly.

Minimal Downtime

Downtime-inducing incidents like data loss, natural disasters, and hardware failure significantly affect your company’s productivity and profitability. If you move to Office 365, you’ll never have to worry about this problem because Microsoft hosts the platform and your files in data centers spread all across the globe. Should one of these data centers fail, you’ll still have access to your data, provided you have a reliable internet connection.

What’s more, Office 365 is managed, maintained, and secured by a team of professionals to ensure 99.9% uptime. That’s an uptime guarantee that most enterprise software don’t offer.

Data security and compliance

Cyberattacks are also a huge bane to your productivity. If hackers manage to steal or corrupt your data, you could spend thousands of dollars restoring and reproducing everything. Fortunately, Office 365 is stored on Microsoft’s secure servers that are proactively managed by security experts.

Office 365 is also built with data loss prevention, access management, and advanced encryption features. These protections make Office 365 a perfect solution for businesses that must comply with strict compliance mandates like HIPAA, PCI-DSS, and SOX.

Automatic updates

When you use Office 365, you never have to worry about software updates. All users will get the latest feature and security updates as soon as they’re released. If IT maintenance is slowing down your company, then Office 365 is the best solution.

There are a lot more ways Office 365 can benefit your company. To learn what those benefits are, contact us today for a demonstration. Or, if you want to subscribe to Office 365, we provide enterprise-level migrations and support, too.