Too many small and mid-size business owners get confused by this: Office 365 for business offers much more capability than its home-use version. In a business setting, Microsoft’s popular Word, PowerPoint, Excel and Outlook applications are not enough.
For a responsive and efficient workflow, you need your employees to be able to collaborate. Even businesses with as few as 10 employees discover difficulties with version control, user access and unexpected data loss. However, the biggest stumbling block can be the lack of tightly integrated collaborations tools: communication and cloud backup solutions for business.
Read on to find out how Office 365 can help you make your employees more productive.
File sharing and collaboration taking too much time
Microsoft’s OneDrive cloud storage and backup service are available publicly, but business versions provide a lot more capability. Secure sharing within teams, with external vendors and tighter user access controls, are worth their weight in gold. They reduce the administrative hassle of having to set up separate servers and manually maintaining versions.
Benefits
- Real time collaboration and access control
- Share documents with vendors and clients securely
- Automatic version control
- Protection from accidental deletion and corruption
- Document availability on computers and mobile devices
Easy cloud backup solutions for businesses struggling with data loss
Office 365 for business gives users 1 TB (or 1024 gigabytes) of data storage with their base plan. For most users that is just the right amount of data storage capacity to start with. There are always options to increase storage capacity optionally. However, with the correct data backup policies, your business can really make its cloud storage last. A managed IT services solutions provider can integrate storage and automate scheduled backups with OneDrive for business seamlessly. We help businesses formulate simple strategies to ensure their data is secure in the cloud and available whenever they need it.
Benefits
- Secure backups
- Offsite storage
- Scheduled backups
- Data available anytime and everywhere
- Disaster recovery planning
Organization-wide collaboration is becoming unreliable
With so many people together, it is no wonder that businesses need collaboration tools. Microsoft SharePoint, exclusive to Office 365 for business, enables just that. Essentially, SharePoint gives you tremendous sharing tools, with real time user access control. Make sure your CRM team is up to date with sales; production departments are providing updates and specifications; and you have an overview of it all. SharePoint is fantastically versatile and gives small and mid-size business the same tools that enterprises rely on.
Benefits
- Enterprise-level sharing and collaboration
- Improved workflow
- Company-wide announcements
- Powerful dashboards and real time monitoring
Lack of communications tools is hurting professional growth
Skype works just fine for personal and even small business meetings. However, when you are dealing with multiple teams and professional clients, your communication solution needs to be far more capable. Can you host a perfect, high definition video stream with 300 professionals and have real time communication with a consumer solution? No!
Benefits
- Secure communication channels
- Allowing participants to join an internet call from mobiles
- Meet corporate compliance requirements
- Flexible audience tools
- Host multiple sites and large conferences in one stream
A large budget for small, disjointed capabilities
The greatest advantage with Office 365 for business is that the solution is fully scalable. It grows with your organization, ensuring you never waste your resources on solutions that you don’t need. Monthly plans also mean that you don’t have to plan large outlays at the beginning of every year. Add or subtract capacity as you need it.
Benefits
- No large financial outlays
- Monthly plans provide great flexibility
- Add resources as your team grows
- Rapidly deploy capabilities as needed
Speak to a NUMENTIS representative to find out how we can help you extract the maximum value from your Office 365 suite of software and services.
