You might have noticed that Microsoft recently rebranded their Office 365 suite to Microsoft 365. Globally, around 120 million active business users are on a subscription plan but many are under-utilising all that the licence has to offer… Outlook for email, Word for creating documents, Excel for spreadsheets and PowerPoint for presentations. But if that’s all you’re using from M365, you’re missing out—there’s so much more included in the Microsoft 365 subscription.
The main advantage of the M365 suite is that it is all the applications work together, helping companies to connect and collaborate in real time. OneNote can be shared and using a smartphone and Office Lens allows you to turn a snapshot of notes on a whiteboard into a digital note. Co-authoring can take place in Word and saved in OneDrive or SharePoint, shared with colleagues. If you keep lots of documents in SharePoint, you can create customer views for better organisation. It is also super convenient for attaching files and use the Share+ function to add a shareable link to your emails, rather than going through the process of attaching (and taking up space in your inbox). You can sync SharePoint documents to your device with OneDrive for business, much as you would a network drive in traditional file server set ups. Creating M365 Groups allows you to maintain communications with specific members both within and outside your organisation, using parameters you set. Once you create a group, you can share a calendar between the members, exchange files, and of course, conveniently chat.
Teams also plays a vital role in collaboration. The ability to capture information and easily share it across platforms is huge. Combining Teams with other applications – such as OneDrive and Outlook, can give you modern collaborative and sharing options that help easily track changes and access as well as allowing you to host webinars with Business Standard.
Power Automate is one of the most underused M365 applications. Everybody has different process workflows that Power Automate could automate. Time off requests, expenses, purchase requests – these could all be streamlined.
The moral of this story is don’t keep doing things the old way – take a step back and look at what you’re doing day-to-day then embrace the new ways of working. New tools, new methods of working. If you need help implementing your M365 subscription, or just want to learn more about what it can do for you then contact us!