Like all large-scale, mass-market programs, Microsoft 365 is known by most computer literate people on earth. We all know how to create a spreadsheet, word process a document, or create a short presentation to show our colleagues and clients.
But, beyond the basics, how can you actually squeeze the most value out of the Microsoft suite of services? How can you maximize the return on the investment that you’ve made on Microsoft’s services? This short guide will explain how to get the very best out of your Microsoft 365 software.
Training Your Staff
As mentioned above, everyone believes they have a grip on the Microsoft software that they’ve likely been using since they were children. But few people have actually mastered it – to the level of knowing the shortcuts built into the different programs, and using them to cut down the time it takes them to create documents and hit their deadlines. With productivity being a huge ambition for all businesses, simple training courses are a way to drive productivity in all of your staff.
There are two ways to go about training your staff in advanced Microsoft skills. You can either outsource the entire process and send your staff members, one by one, off to a short training course. Or you can perform the training in-house, using a presentation or a course created by your IT team to train employees.
Storage
Meanwhile, productivity isn’t the only benefit you’ll get from maximizing the efficiency with which you use Microsoft 365. You’ll also gain from the software package’s synchronized storage capability, which ushers all saved files onto the cloud. Cloud storage is, of course, seen as the gold standard for business data backups, helping staff access files from anywhere, at any time.
But it’s also a key way in which you’re able to organize your workers, and your teams, around certain files and folders stored in the cloud. By using Microsoft’s synchronizing features, and by using file management software provided by the likes of avepoint.com, you can ensure that all of your important files are backed up and stored sensibly within your firm.
Collaboration
In these times of pandemic lockdowns and concerned colleagues, it’s now more than ever the remote working is reaching its true zenith. Hundreds of thousands of businesses across the country have come to realize that collaboration remotely is quite possible – the tools were always there to perform such work if used correctly. And Microsoft has certainly risen to the challenges posed by 2020 and the coronavirus.
There’s Microsoft Teams, which enables your staff to talk and work together via video link, rather than in the same office. The same software enables instant messaging – that bit quicker than email. But, perhaps most importantly, Microsoft 365, based on the cloud, enables you to collaborate on the same documents at the same time from different locations – a huge boon for businesses that continue to operate outside of the office in 2020.
There you have it: three key ways in which you can use Microsoft 365 to its full potential this year and into the future.
