Just think of all the different interactions that go into creating a single document or deliverable. All those emails and meetings. All those changes and file versions to track and manage. Office 365 is designed to streamline these complex activities, channeling them through a single, unified platform.
Here are three ways this powerful productivity suite improves communication and collaboration:
- Efficient communication platforms: In an enterprise, communication covers a wide range of activities, many of which begin with a corporate intranet. Among other communication tasks, an enterprise intranet allows you to deliver services and information, build your culture and brand through a public website, and provide a central hub for employees who want to learn more about overall initiatives and explore resources.SharePoint Online is a great platform for developing a corporate intranet, and Office 365 helps to facilitate this communication tool without the technical burden of managing your own server and on-premises infrastructure. And for general communication outside the corporate intranet, Office 365’s integrated services increase your ability to communicate effectively with colleagues in the digital workplace.
- Support for internal and external collaboration: Office 365’s communication and collaboration solutions allow your employee base to collaborate effectively with one another as well as with external partners. While email is great for tasks such as recording information, sharing official documents and creating an electronic record of an action, it’s an inefficient tool for other collaboration activities.When it comes to quick questions and co-authoring documents, for example, instant messaging, Yammer and SharePoint sites offer better ways to share information. By integrating these tools, Office 365 enables organizations to have a multidimensional collaborative environment that puts knowledge in an actionable context and breaks down geographical barriers to productivity.
- Social enterprise capabilities that drive innovation: Social enterprise tools give people in your organization the ability to interact with business content at the speed and fluidity of social media. Since most employees are already proficient with using tools like Facebook and Twitter in their personal lives, offering similar technology in the enterprise applies that pre-existing proficiency to business tasks. While planning is essential for successfully implementing the social enterprise tools in Office 365, the tools themselves present no real learning curve and require no new training. It’s easy to “like” a piece of content, comment on site contents, have a forum-like threaded conversation or embed a personalized newsfeed that aggregates different discussions across your organization.Yammer, included in the Office 365 suite, allows your organization to set up different groups and use discussion threads specific to a department, line of business or community of interest. It enables members of your organization to ask questions in an informal context while sharing their knowledge with a larger audience. Compared to asking and answering questions individually via email, Yammer makes it easier for the company to retain this knowledge and make it accessible to others with the same questions.
In the end, Office 365 is a great way for both large and small organizations to communicate and collaborate in a way that’s effective — and affordable.
For instance, some large corporations are using the Office 365 bundle as a low-cost way to move their corporate intranet operations into SharePoint Online and bring their Exchange servers into the cloud. And for smaller organizations, the suite offers the advantage of the latest communication and collaboration solutions without the prohibitive expense of supporting these applications on-premises.
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
