Top Microsoft Office 365 Tools Organizations Should Be Using

We’ve all heard enough about Office 365 (now renamed Microsoft 365) tools how it boosts collaboration, has awesome document management capabilities, saves on IT costs, gives anywhere-anytime access, is secure, etc. This maybe old and boring information; but, are you reaping the benefits of your Microsoft Office 365 investment?

Most organizations aren’t, and the reason is that they don’t want to step out of their comfort zone. They are “used to” doing work in a certain way and continue doing so, knowing that their methods are inefficient and clunky. Well, stand apart from the rest by embracing enterprise IT innovation and progress so that you can rub shoulders with the giants and not feel left behind.

Microsoft Office 365 is Microsoft’s state of the art Enterprise IT environment and is changing the way businesses work. We’ve put together a list of the top Microsoft Office 365 tools that you should be using.

#1: SharePoint

The Problem: Do you feel that your data is scattered all over the place and you spend a lot of valuable time searching for information when you need it? Are you skipping from one tool to another all day because you can’t accomplish all your tasks from one solution?

The Solution: SharePoint is a platform where you can host your email, store and manage documents and disseminate company wide information through alerts and announcements so as not to clog inboxes. Team sites help you to manage projects and keep track of tasks and timelines and shared calendars which gives you a quick view of upcoming events and meeting availability of employees. When you can do ALL your work on a central portal; information is at your fingertips and you never have to waste time looking for it.

Another benefit is the power of SharePoint customizations and scalability, which are key for any organization. You can create new departments, set permissions based on your organization structure and add new employees as they are hired. You can further enhance SharePoint’s features with ready-to-go solutions like BizPortals 365, which offer Employee Management, Goals Management and Business Process tools to bring all your processes under one roof.

#2: Yammer

The Problem: Do you want to add a dynamic component to your currently static sites? Do you want to introduce a social tool to boost inter-department collaboration?

The Solution: Yammer nicknamed “Facebook for Businesses” is a social network tool which allows employees of your company to interact with each other. You can use this tool only if you have a login through your company.

It has a very simple, familiar look which users can quickly get accustomed to. You can update your status and post questions or information, which others can comment on. All your posts don’t have to be public, you can even have private one-on-one conversations.

Along with having features similar to a social networking app, it also provides the capability to attach files to a post, use hashtags to make posts searchable and create groups/teams for collaboration. All this functionality makes it possible to manage small internal projects using Yammer.

Microsoft Office 365 has many other tools but starting with these 5 will give you quick results which will help solidify your faith in the product and hopefully help you give a shot at using the other tools like Delve, Skype, Teams, etc.

#3: Power BI

The Problem: You have all the data you need but how do you make sense of it? What good is data if all it does is sits in databases and files?

The Solution: Just collecting data is not enough. Data is a goldmine of insight; you have to be able to classify, mine, and analyze it to predict future trends, to make investment decisions, or do sales forecasting.

Analyzing data becomes much easier if you can visualize it and that is exactly what Power BI helps you do. Power BI is a “self-service” suite and has user-friendly tools which allow you to connect to your data and create highly interactive visualizations and reports which can be saved or published and shared with others.

All you need is a web browser and Microsoft Office 365 login to use the capabilities of Power BI. It also has a desktop version which you can install for free.

Similar to tools like Siri (the personal assistant from Apple) which allows users to use “Natural Language” to interact with a computer, Power BI has a tool called “Q&A” that allows users to do business analysis using “Natural Language”.

#4: PowerApps

The Problem: Do you want to mobilize your workforce with apps but you don’t have the means to build them?

The Solution: Microsoft PowerApps allows you to create mobile apps to display your data or modify and add to it, without programming or app development skills. All you have to do is point to a data source and pick a template based on the format of that data, add a few controls and publish it. The app can be published for the web or for mobile devices.

Imagine all the functionality you can make available on mobile devices!

If you have an Excel spreadsheet on OneDrive that various users are updating, you can create a mobile app which will let you view and track the data when you are on the go. You can do this quickly, without having to requisition developer resources. You can even create forms that employees can use to request time-off or for expense reimbursements.

#5: OneDrive

The Problem: Are you tired of emailing a document to yourself or worse, printing it so that you can review it when you are away from the office? Do you sometimes have to duplicate work because you can’t find it or because you did it on a different machine?

The Solution: OneDrive is a cloud solution which gives you anywhere, anytime access to your documents, on any device.

• You can upload, and edit files from your desktop, favorite browser, or mobile devices.
• You can store all your documents in OneDrive and sync with your PC or Mac for convenient offline access.
• You can even create documents directly from your web browser using the light version of Microsoft Office (Word, Excel, PowerPoint and OneNote), which gives you the basic editing tools you would need for document creation.

One of the greatest features offered by OneDrive is that it allows you to collaborate on documents with others. Two or more users can simultaneously modify a document, saving multiple iterations and time wasted in sending the document back and forth between all involved authors.

OneDrive offers 1 TB document storage space per user with the document size limit of 10 GB.

If you have questions about migrating over to Microsoft Office 365 or how to boost adoption, we are just an email away. Send us an email at bizinfo@bizportals.com or visit our website at www.bizportals365.com for more information.