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The statistics say that over a million companies use Office 365 for business globally. With the total of 600K enterprises resorting to Office 365.
Microsoft offers a collection of cloud-based software that includes Word, Excel, PowerPoint, OneNote, Outlook, OneDrive, and Microsoft Teams. This software package is called the Office 365 suite.
However, earlier this year, Microsoft renamed the Office 365 collaboration tools to the Microsoft 365 suite. The office suite is a software package consisting of applications used for a multitude of purposes like word processing, database management, storage, etc.
Microsoft’s Office 365 accounts for a total of 38 percent of the market. With the advent of COVID-19, everyone right from the big organizations to new age startups switched to working from home. This fundamental change demanded the tools facilitating the remote work routine are up and going. And, hence, this resulted in the widespread popularity of applications like Microsoft Teams, Zoom, Slack, Trello, and the likes.
Here is How Remote Teams can Leverage Office 365 for Collaboration
Microsoft Teams for Collaboration
Microsoft noted a 775% spike in the team’s calling and meeting usage in just one month. These numbers were observed in Italy, which was one of the first few countries battling the pandemic. Teams now has 44M daily users.
Microsoft Teams is a cloud collaboration tool that offers dynamic features for simulating and organizing the remote workspace. It enables you to interact within as well as outside the teams. You can make calls, host routine standups and meetings, and share files and essential artifacts.
If you want to leverage Office 365 for collaboration, then Teams is an excellent option to consider.
Teams is Microsoft’s variant of cloud collaboration tools like Slack, Zoom, Trello, etc. It offers a wide array of prerogatives that you should consider to determine which platforms satisfy your needs aptly. Needless to say, Teams seamlessly integrates with Office 365. That said, if you are already leveraging Office 365 for your enterprise functioning, then Teams is the option you would like to go for.
Teams equips you to create dedicated chat channels for domain/team specific conversations. For instance, you can create separate channels for development, testing, marketing, design, etc.
Microsoft collaboration tools can help you significantly reduce email overheads. Chats can expedite to resolve minor queries. If you still want to resort to an email, you can send it to your respective team channel(s). The email will appear in the conversation thread to viewers.
Also read: How can Cloud Computing Help Companies Sail Through Covid-19?
SharePoint and OneDrive for File Sharing
Leveraging Office 365 for collaboration has become a common practice among enterprises, large and small, due to their widespread popularity. The dynamic and adaptable tools that Microsoft offers have redefined conventional work practices. Among those, the remarkable ones are SharePoint and OneDrive; you can use them for storage-related services in collaborative working environments.
OneDrive and SharePoint, both predominantly file storage systems, are quite different in the overall performance and usage. OneDrive is a go-to simple cloud storage system that stores files and folders online. SharePoint, on the other hand, offers a multitude of features along with storage that includes real-time collaboration, a content management system, and an option to create dashboards.
OneDrive is suited mainly for individuals or teams who want to have a central storage location for entire data. SharePoint, however, is a viable option for business teams that need to work collaboratively with multiple people interacting with the contents and documents simultaneously.
OneNote
Microsoft OneNote is another real-time collaboration application that is a part of the Office 365 suite. OneNote is not just a simple note-taking application, as it may sound. Instead, it is flexible and integrates with different platforms, including LinkedIn, Twitter, Flickr, YouTube, Facebook, etc.
OneNote enables the users to share the notebooks and work collaboratively. You can share them privately, over a mail, or send them to Google Drive, Gmail, and the likes. You can also set up Outlook meetings through OneNote.
Microsoft Exchange Server
Microsoft is an enterprise-class email server that offers protection and control with your emails. Ever wonder how difficult it would have been if you couldn’t access mail on your smartphone! All credits to Microsoft Exchange Server.
This software package accounts for the synchronization of email on mobile phones. Now you can prioritize your messages and focus on the important emails.
The Exchange server has features like reminders and to-do tasks, but the even better part is a calendar. It grabs the events from your mails and blocks your schedule automatically.
Active Directory
Microsoft Active Directory is an identity and access management console. It helps in managing the permissions and providing access to private networks. Active Directory stores data as objects and categorizes those objects based on names and attributes.
It facilitates single sign-on and multi-factor authentication, making sure your business and data assets are secured to the best possible levels.
You can also manage customers and service providers who are not in your network. Scaling and moving all your apps slowly to a single sign-on system is easy with Active Directory.
Forms
Microsoft Forms is a collaborative survey-tool offering poll, surveys, and quizzes. Forms helps in conducting online surveys and taking votes on a proposal. Quizzes for instance, are particularly great for students and can help in the EdTech business.
Whether you want to measure the workforce sentiments, or measure the clients’ responses, capture them via one of the forms. These tools offer an analysis of the captured data in the form of charts and excel export.
Microsoft Power Automate
This tool by Microsoft lets you create automated workflows. It improves work productivity by leveraging business process automation. Connect your data sitting in Azure and start automation with both robotic and digital transformation.
With its intuitive RPA facility, you can save much time by automatic manual processes.
Before Wrapping Up…
The bottom line is, in the current scenario of the COVID pandemic, remote work is the new normal. Therefore, enterprises need to scale-up their operations as per the market outlook. It is, thus, beneficial to resort to software packages like Office 365 for business. It caters to all the corporate needs making remote work smooth and efficient. Therefore, leveraging it for remote work can highly optimize your productivity.
If you are facing difficulties in aligning your workforce to working from home in the right manner, try shifting to Microsoft Office 365. Experts like the Logesys team can help you set up a collaborative environment to ease the daily hassles of your organization. Reach us here if you are looking for help in Microsoft Office 365 collaboration.