With over 85 million monthly active commercial users, Office 365 continues its rise as the cloud–based office system of choice for businesses around the world. It’s totally transformed business systems and processes, making them easier, quicker, more cost-effective and more collaborative. So successful has it been, Microsoft’s latest financial results revealed revenue for Office 365 increased by 42% year-on-year.
We’ve been supplying our clients with Office 365 since 2013 and in the intervening five years have seen many developments in its capabilities, to the point where we can think of no other business application which offers the advantages of Office 365.
Using the Microsoft Office Suite you are already familiar with, Office 365 offers business-class email, shared calendars, Skype for Business, cloud file storage and collaborative workspaces such as Microsoft Teams.
It also includes a range of applications you may not be so familiar with. OneNote allows you to capture information on the go and then retrieve those notes from any other device. Delve, Yammer, OneDrive and Sway are all tools designed to help businesses work collaboratively where you can communicate, brainstorm ideas, share documents and have video meetings whilst on the go. SharePoint and Flow enable you to have your own powerful document management system and document workflows, plus with data tagging you can now classify all types of data for GDPR compliance. And Power BI is a powerful tool used for gathering business intelligence, sorting it and then presenting it in easy to understand and beautifully presented reports.
You can work together in real time, no matter what device or where you are, without compromising security. Better still, as part of the subscription you are automatically upgraded to the latest releases of enterprises solutions with the assurance that your data is being protected by the highest standard of cloud computing. Microsoft spend over $1 billion a year on cyber security and in the case of Office 365, make sure they encrypt all your data at rest and in transit, regularly back it up and do not mine it for advertising purposes.
Office 365 has brought together a range of sophisticated applications, previously only affordable to large businesses, into the reach of small to medium sized businesses. It’s levelled the business systems playing field, allowing these SMEs to successfully play on the same pitch as the multi-national Goliaths of the business world.
With offices both here in Guernsey and in Dubai and the team constantly away from the office using it 24/7, Resolution IT’s use of Office 365 is at the core of our daily business lives. Whilst we use it for email and sharing and reviewing of documents through SharePoint Online, we also use it for up-to-date business intelligence and analytics (Power BI) as well as Skype for Business, online board packs, complete with a modern intranet. It’s been a complete game changer for us, allowing us to work more collaboratively, more conveniently and more swiftly. Everyone has access to the information they need at any time and they can work on it and share it at any time. Office 365 has broken down time zones and traditional ways of working and improved the way we work tenfold.
