Being more productive with Office 365

Microsoft Office 365 is a great product, which most businesses use in one way or another. I’m sure most of you are aware of the product and have used it for your business email either currently or previously, for example, to access your business email.

Using Office 365 to host your email is great, as it gives you a reliable cloud-based email system, that can be accessed from any device, without any hassle. Thanks to the infrastructure that Microsoft has in place, they take care of redundancy and connectivity, leaving you to concentrate on the task at hand.

There are a number of additional products and services you can make use of, that are part of the same Office 365 family. Some of these you might be aware of, and some you might not. Hopefully, you might discover something that enhances your productivity.

Having a central place to share all the documents in your business

Office 365 allows you to have a central shared storage area for all of your business documents and files, which can be accessed through Windows Explorer, which you might be used to from accessing files on a server in the past. You can share, collaborate and restrict access to certain folders, based on job roles or departments for example. If you’re still emailing files to each other, you should strongly consider putting this in place.

Having a Wiki-style library for your business processes and documentation

We’re sure you’ve visited Wikipedia for something or other, at some point. With Office 365, you can create a similar site, which is private and just for your business to access. This is great for guides, employee documentation and other useful information. For example, you might want your company contact information on there, a how-to guide for customer services and a template for your monthly expenses.

Having a shared team calendar, one place to check who’s on holiday

Outlook calendars – they’re great, aren’t they? They are until your business becomes quite large, and then checking every single employee’s calendar to see what they’re up to, becomes very time-consuming and unnecessary. This is where you simply need one central team calendar, for the important things. For example, this might be holidays, sickness and those important out-of-office appointments. This way, everyone just has to check one diary to see what people are up to. It does not need to be a running dialogue of your daily activities, just the significant things which impact the operations of the business.

Having the latest Microsoft Office (and more) software available to you

With the right license in Office 365, you can get the full software to install on your computer. There are the usual suspects such as Outlook, Word, Excel and PowerPoint, but there are also other software applications which you might benefit from. Some of these are Access, Publisher and Forms. With the software being linked to Office 365, it means you’re always on the latest version of the software, and get all the security patches automatically.

And of course, using Teams for calls and online meetings…

Ok, so this is more than obvious in this day and age, so it’s more of a reminder that if you have Office 365, you can get the full version of Microsoft Teams and not only do video meetings, but you can link it to a phone system and use it for instant messaging. It is more than just video meetings, but on that note, if you’re paying for Zoom, but have an Office 365 license, you can probably save some money by switching to Teams.

Hopefully, you learnt something today, or have an idea of how you might use Office 365 to become more productive.

If you wish to discuss any of these ideas, please email hello@lucidcomputersolutions.co.uk or call us on 01527 908646.

Gavin Moorhouse is the owner of Lucid Computer Solutions, based in Redditch, Worcestershire, they provide businesses with Office 365 support and consultancy. When Gavin isn’t advising businesses on Office 365, he enjoys a good curry.