Microsoft Office 365 may be the world’s favorite productivity suite, but most users take advantage of only a fraction of the many features and abilities it has to offer. Aside from providing all the benefits of a cutting-edge data center without having to maintain one yourself, it offers unrivaled collaboration and scalability. Here are a few ways you can start getting more out of Office 365 right away:
#1. Collaborate over SharePoint
SharePoint Online is available with the Business Premium, Business Essentials, and the Enterprise E3 subscription packages of Office 365. As an all-in-one collaboration platform for businesses of all sizes, it features a wide range of abilities, including online file storage, internal social networking, and document management features.
By setting up a SharePoint site, you’ll have an online resource for sharing documents, providing easy access to enterprise applications, and much more. Your team site also serves as a place for internal announcements, and you can even use it to build a fully fledged knowledgebase for accelerating shared business processes and information.
#2. Use the scheduling assistant
Many business leaders waste far too much time trying to organize meetings without having clear visibility into the availability of their employees. However, when you use the scheduling assistant in the Outlook web app, you can set up meetings and book conference rooms in minutes.
Using Exchange Online, employees can set statuses such as available, busy, out of the office, or working elsewhere. When organizers want to schedule a meeting, they can use the scheduling assistant to display selected times based on the availability of their team members. This greatly reduces the amount of time going back and forth while trying to arrange a meeting.
#3. Filter your emails with Clutter
According to Statista, over half of all emails received are spam. Countless more are on the borderline between spam and legitimate marketing or newsletter emails. Given how reliant businesses are on email, anything that helps you manage flooded inboxes more efficiently is sure to lead to a welcome boost in productivity.
Clutter is a feature included in Outlook 2016 that filters less important emails so you can focus on more pressing ones first. Clutter relies on machine learning to analyze your past behavior and improve over time. Anything that gets filtered will be automatically placed in the Clutter folder.
#4. Synchronize your files
While much of the emphasis is on cloud computing these days, there will occasionally be times when you don’t have access to the internet but still need to get work done. No matter how connected you are, it’s still wise to have a local copy of mission-critical information. An outage shouldn’t mean productivity comes to a grinding halt!
Many Office 365 subscriptions combine cloud-based productivity with familiar desktop environments by allowing you to automatically synchronize files between the two. This way, you can continue to work with your documents offline and have them sync back with the files on OneDrive once you get back online.
#5. Track issues with the Service Health Dashboard
A significant portion of an administrator’s job is dealing with inquiries from users who are experiencing problems. That’s why they need an efficient reporting and resolution system that allows them to address issues faster, rather than having staff wasting their time trying to find inadequate workarounds to otherwise minor problems.
The Service Health Dashboard provides a convenient, centralized platform for tracking the status of all the Office 365 services your company uses. All reported incidences and advisories appear here, along with any necessary background information, such as who’s impacted by the problem.
Founders Technology Groups offers IT solutions and expert advice to organizations around Connecticut. Call us today if you’re looking for a technology partner you can depend on.