Thanks to the cloud-based Office 365 productivity suite, companies with limited IT resources now have access to true enterprise-class solutions once only available to large organizations. In the past, smaller organizations often didn’t have the resources to implement sophisticated digital workplace solutions, but that’s all changing with Office 365’s fast implementation, low cost and streamlined applications and services.
Here are ten ways that Office 365 improves your organization’s digital workplace.
- Gain new functionalities: Most organizations start looking at Office 365 because they are considering an email upgrade to Microsoft Exchange. If you’re planning to upgrade your email, it makes sense to look at Office 365, which offers many new capabilities, especially for smaller organizations.
- Facilitate a desktop refresh: Companies that are running on Office 2007, for example, might be due for a desktop refresh project, and this is a good opportunity to check out the additional features and benefits Office 365 offers.
- Reduce data center expenses: Moving to Office 365 is a great way to cut back on your data center costs and footprint. Using a cloud-based platform helps some organizations to eliminate on-premises servers and their associated costs, including storage space, energy, maintenance and hardware investments.
- Make better use of IT personnel: By freeing your IT experts from routine system administrator duties, you enable them to work on more strategic projects. Switching to Office 365 helps reduce the burden on admin by rolling on-site Exchange, SharePoint and other Microsoft enterprise applications into one cloud service. This is especially helpful for smaller companies.
- Simplify your pricing: If you’re currently juggling several separate IT products, each with different pricing and payment details, you’ll find that Office 365’s bundled subscription pricing is much easier to understand and manage.
- Stay up-to-date with easy upgrades: In some situations, upgrading one software solution throws a monkey wrench into the larger system, requiring troubleshooting and integrations to make sure your tools are working together. The integrated Office 365 platform brings all these tools together, streamlining the upgrade process. This makes it easier to keep your systems up-to-date and working together.
- Improve usability: Integrate content and collaboration within a single platform. Compared to using separate applications, the single platform makes it easier to access SharePoint content or Lync collaboration tools while working in your email, for example.
- Improve the customer experience: Office 365 also offers flexible, cost-effective ways to connect with customers, such as creating a customer extranet or setting up customer logins. Some licensing packages include access for up to 10,000 external internet users, which definitely opens new possibilities for improving your customers’ experience.
- Boost productivity by making it easy to access and reuse corporate content: Enterprise search is a good example of how Office 365 improves findability. Setting up a true enterprise search is difficult and requires lots of customization when you’re searching across disparate systems that don’t share information easily. With everything pulled together in a single productivity suite, enterprise search becomes more robust, opening up the ability to search across Outlook profiles, SharePoint documents, Yammer conversations and a wide range of content.
- Consistency in the mobile digital workplace: Today’s professionals work from a variety of mobile devices. Office 365 was designed to accommodate this paradigm through cross-browser compatibility and mobile applications that provide a consistent experience and enhanced digital workplace for employees on the move.
For many organizations, Office 365 simply makes good business sense. Its improved usability and productivity support revenue growth, for instance, and the cloud platform’s fast implementation offers significant cost savings compared to older solutions. Time is money, and this integrated solution frees up more of those resources for other business initiatives.
Learn more about planning your organization’s Office 365 migration by contacting Withum.
