The Office 365 productivity suite helps to solve this problem, combining the familiar business tools that most companies have used in one form or another for the past decade with powerful new capabilities and applications.
Here are three ways Office 365 helps to streamline your knowledge management and workflow:
- Streamlined knowledge-sharing through document management: Many organizations already use SharePoint for document management, which frees business data from file-shares, improves searchability, and offers tools for managing versioning history and user access. In addition to serving as a collaboration platform and document repository, SharePoint has added features that take it far beyond a file share’s knowledge management capabilities. On their own, these capabilities help to improve productivity and knowledge-sharing, but Office 365 takes them a step further. With the cloud-based SharePoint Online in Office 365, the improved user interface and interconnectivity makes it easy to transfer documents to the SharePoint library and offers seamless document sharing.
- Workflow management and automation: Many enterprises have difficulty when it comes to managing and automating workflows. Office 365 and SharePoint Online present you with out-of-the-box workflow management capabilities that help to automate business processes. And since Office 365 integrates so many tools, it enables you to pull in certain actions from email as part of the process execution within your workflow.For more complex workflows and automation, your enterprise may want to use third-party products that interact with Office 365. Some of these tools offer a better user interface for creating online forms, processing information through a workflow and automation.
- Powerful enterprise search: Compared to browsing, search functions are often more effective tools for finding and using content.The enterprise search capabilities within Office 365 and SharePoint Online have been developed over a long time for some of the largest companies around the world, and fine-tuned and integrated within the Office 365 platform to provide you with a robust and cost-effective search experience. This search capability enriches document management, social enterprise, communication and collaboration, helping users to find content quickly and easily, which improves productivity and reduces duplication of efforts.
Office 365 also helps employees communicate efficiently during document creation and management tasks by integrating SharePoint Online with email (Exchange Online), unified communications (Lync Online) and enterprise social networking (Yammer). When an employee has questions about a document change, for example, it’s easy to send an instant message to a colleague through the integrated Lync features. Other team members have the option to find the document in a Yammer group newsfeed and comment on updates or changes.
Finally, the Office 365 suite supports effective knowledge management by offering inexpensive cloud storage for all of your documents. OneDrive for Business, included in Office 365, gives each user one terabyte of cloud storage.
Learn more about helping your organization leverage today’s digital workplace capabilities by downloading our new white paper, “The Business Value Of Office 365 To The Enterprise”.
Contributor: Jill Hannemann, practice director for SharePoint Advisory Services at Portal Solutions
