There’s no doubt about it – businesses are continuing to be disrupted in a pretty big way as a result of the impacts of COVID. If your business wasn’t already set up to operate under any circumstance, it’s most likely that the pandemic has given you the wake up call you needed to make it happen.
Pandemics aside, it’s important and highly beneficial for your business to be able to run optimally, with whatever situation arises. You want to know that ‘business as usual’ is possible in the shortest space of time, from wherever your team may need to be geographically. This is where your business IT setup and cloud services such as Microsoft 365 can help.
Having the right IT services, systems and processes nailed for your business enables smooth transition for individuals and teams between working in the office, remotely from home and on the move.
Microsoft 365 with Microsoft Teams, offers innovative office apps, cloud services and world-class security. From a business perspective, these cloud computing services can be a clear winner for your IT needs, whichever industry you’re in.
Let’s take a look at the benefits of Microsoft 365:
Cloud based businesses
What does it mean for something to be ‘cloud-based’? Everyone is talking about it, but to summarise it as simply as possible, instead of anything digital (like data, workloads, IT resources or applications) being saved and stored on a personal computer or local servers, it is stored, managed and processed on remote servers hosted on the internet. In other words ‘in the cloud’.
What this means for you and your team is, as long as you have an internet connection, you can access what you need on demand, online, regardless of where you are located. For this reason, if you want to operate with more flexibility, cloud services are the way to go. When properly structured, Cloud solutions such as Microsoft 365 allow for your business files and data to accessed anywhere, but more importantly, remain protected. You’ll be able to ensure only team members are able to access data that’s relevant to their roles, no matter where they are working from.
Unlike physical servers – the benefits of cloud computing include the flexibility to quickly and easily change and evolve as your business grows. Microsoft 365 enables all of your business to move to the cloud, so you can work effectively and efficiently in and out of lockdowns.
Some of the biggest cloud computing benefits:
- Greater collaboration for staff
- Check out our recent post on Benefits of Collaborative Tools in O365
- Business continuity
- Immediate access to automatic updates
- Increased cyber security features
- Reduced footprint (no need for data centres)
- Speed – get things done faster
- Reduced IT costs.
Now that we have a better idea of what it means to be a cloud based business, as well as why it may benefit you and your business, let’s look at it in context of how it can help whether you’re working from home, in the office or on the move.
Working from home
Microsoft 365 empowers all team members to quickly and effectively work from home. The beauty of Microsoft 365 is that as long as you have an internet connection, you can access what you need to get your job done as though you were on-site. With the addition of Microsoft Teams, you can stay organised, work collaboratively and have conversations all in one place.
Microsoft 365 Cloud Services enables your team to effectively even when working from home
Benefits of using Office 365 when Working From Home
Stay connected
From home you are still able to chat, call and host meetings with your colleagues, wherever they are working from. You can also connect via email and calendar to arrange meetings across the organisation, with the ability to access individual calendars to cross check availability.
Share
By loading any documents to the cloud through Teams or One Drive, you and your team are able to share your work and access the latest updates to any document on the spot. Gone are the days of version control confusion.
Collaborate
Using Office apps such as Word, Excel and PowerPoint you can collaborate with your team online and work together on the same documents at the same time. Whilst everyone is working from home, they’ll be collaborating as if they were working side by side.
In the office
Depending on your industry and business, sometimes you might need to physically be on-site. And let’s be honest, it’s good to have face-to-face time with your team, especially when you’ve been working remotely for long stints. Perhaps your organisation has multiple office locations, so when everyone is ‘in the office’, they might not be in the same country, state, time zone or building.
Whichever the case, your business can benefit from the centralised collaboration that Microsoft 365 offers whether you’ve been working in the office the whole time, or come back to the office from a stint of working from home.
Benefits of using 365 in the office
Benefits of using 365 in the officeEdit documents in real time
With the ability to edit and co-author documents in real time, you can continue to work collaboratively with colleagues from the office as though they were sitting at the next desk.
Need to connect?
Craving some water cooler chat time? Want to clear up a simple issue? No need to shoot emails for every request. Jump on a chat through Teams to catch up or quickly resolve a query.
Meetings
Monday morning Work-In-Progress (WIP) meetings can still go ahead whether you are all in the office or not. You can also include external stakeholders outside of your organisation in the meeting where necessary.
On the Move
O365 gives you the power to work and collaborate from anywhere and on any device. Some days you may find yourself out of the office or working from home. You could be commuting on public transport to and from the office or between off-site meetings. Microsoft Teams and Microsoft 365 help you get work done with others and on your own, even on the move.
Find yourself wanting to update documents in real time while sitting in a client meeting? No problem. If you have an internet connection you can still access everything from the cloud through your laptop, tablet or smartphone.
By using the Microsoft Office apps, you’ll be able to work on any device no matter where you are
Why use Microsoft Teams outside of the Office
Download the mobile app
The Office mobile app gives you access to your documents and lets you use Word, Excel, and PowerPoint from your mobile device. This is a great option if you’re hopping between face-to-face meetings with clients and don’t fancy taking your laptop, or you happen to be out and about and want to access documents.
Working offline
If you find yourself offline at any point, you can still:
- Create blank documents, workbooks or presentations
- Open and edit files stored on your device
- Save files on your disk
The pending changes you create will sync as soon as you’re back online.
Shifting your business to Microsoft 365
While you could purchase Microsoft 365 and set it up yourself, wouldn’t you rather have all these benefits without the hassle so you can focus on growing your business?
By using Managed IT services you can get your business up and running with Microsoft 365 and Microsoft Teams and working seamlessly on site, remotely and on the move.
For almost 20 years, Melbourne’s leading Managed IT Services Provider, Discover, has been helping local and national businesses reduce operating costs and increase performance. Quick adapters to change, all IT solutions are scalable so they can evolve as your business grows, or when your business needs change.
Want cost effective IT Services that are easy to understand and manage?
Keen to focus on your business and have technology that enables your business to operate and grow instead of slow it down? Contact the team to arrange a free IT Discovery session. Not only can we help implement and configure O365 to enable your business to effectively run your business when working from home, in the office or on the move, we also provide the following IT Support Services: