Recently, there is a trend wherein small businesses have migrated to the cloud specifically Office 365. Business owners saw its potential in improving their organization’s collaboration and IT costs. In this article, we will explain to you what is Office 365 and why migrating to its cloud services is one of the best investments you can make for your company.
What is Office 365?
Office 365 is a simple and cost-effective way to get a powerful range of cloud Office services plus access to regular new features in desktop Office. Organizations get to utilize standard productivity tools like Word, Powerpoint, Excel and Outlook. Businesses can also access useful cloud services for collaboration. These include Skype for Business, SkyDrive, Sharepoint, Planner and a lot more.
What are the benefits of Office 365 for Small Businesses?
Running a small business nowadays require better collaboration and organizational agility. Time and costs are very important to manage for this stage. Business owners need ways on how to improve the way information is run within the company and its customers to be more competitive. Here are some benefits:
- Collaboration Anytime/Anywhere– organizations can access the rich collaboration tools even if they are out of the office. If you need to share files within your company, you can use SkyDrive for that. If you need to set appointments and share calendars, you can use Outlook and Planner. You can even integrate all of these through your mobile devices ensuring everyone is connected anywhere. These tools can improve teamwork between your staff, helping your company drive to success.
- Safe and Secure Communications– Running your platforms inside the Microsoft clouds ensures that your data are safe. Your business gets the latest security firmware and updates. The servers hosting your data are guaranteed to be safer as these are being managed in an enterprise level security. You can have peace of mind that sensitive company information won’t be easily leaked.
- Cost-Effective IT Solution– Using Office 365 you can have enterprise-grade collaboration tools without the paying an arm and a leg for such infrastructure. Back then, small businesses could not afford to host their own server, maintain security admins and systems admins to run these IT stuff for their business. With a minimum subscription service, you can get all the information tools you need to make your business run efficiently.
- Easy Management– before, companies need to hire systems admin to maintain server applications that were too complicated. It takes a computer science graduate to operate these server tools (Active Directory, File Servers, etc). With Office 365, it has become easier to manage user access and resources.
- Brand Equity– you can have your own company domain and use it for Microsoft Outlook. Having your own email help make your company more professional compared using Gmail ones. This build trusts with customers.
- Focus on your Business– with Office 365, you don’t need to be distracted with the IT stuff. You can use it seamlessly. You can now focus on what matters most: increase sales, improve company efficiency, take care of customers, etc.
Tips on Office 365
Here are some questions you can ask yourself to help evaluate if your company needs Office 365?
- Are there cases wherein my teams are having problems collaborating?
- Are we losing customers because of miscommunications within my team?
- Are we having difficulty tracking our activities and meetings within the team?
- Do I feel that our IT system is vulnerable because we don’t have technology expertise?
- Are we having problems controlling access of information within our organization?
- Are we losing customers because our current IT systems are failing?
