Increase Collaboration Among Remote Workers with Office 365

Office 365 is the world’s leading cloud productivity platform. It allows you to establish a collaborative environment that supports teams composed of on-premise and remote employees. With Office 365, your staff can work together to achieve incredible results anytime, anywhere, and using any device.

The overarching principle of the digital office is collaboration. Collaboration improves problem solving, brings people together, and lets people learn from one another. Studies show it opens new ways to communicate, improves internal relationships, increases employee engagement, boosts morale and makes employees more productive.

In order to take Office 365 beyond its most basic components, it’s necessary to understand the suite of tools that all work together to lead to the digital workplace. To simplify understanding the Office 365 suite of tools, you can think of them in five categories:

• Intranet
• Communication and Collaboration
• File Storing and Sharing
• Content Creation
• Workflow

The Intranet

If Office 365 is the foundation of the digital workplace, then SharePoint’s intranet capabilities are its nerve center. Intranet concepts have changed over the years from its inception when its main function was publishing internal news and instructions. Today, the intranet is more like an internal social network that includes discussion and communities. In addition, today’s intranet is used anywhere, anytime, and with any device.

Communication and Collaboration Tools

Teams: Is the hub for teamwork in Office 365. Teams brings everything together in a shared workspace where you can chat, meet, share files, and work with built-in Office 365 apps like Word, Excel, PowerPoint, and SharePoint.

Planner: You can use Planner to organize teams, helping them to work together seamlessly. It offers the ability to create plans, organize and assign tasks, share files, chat among the members assigned to the plan, and get progress updates.

File Storing and Sharing

OneDrive for Business: This cloud storage acts like your My Documents folder in the cloud. You can store files, share them, and access them from any location or device.

Stream: Stream does for videos what OneDrive does for documents and other file types. Use it to store and share video content. It provides a seamless video experience across web and mobile apps and with speech to text and auto-generated closed captions, it’s easier than ever for your employees to search for relevant content quickly and easily.

Content Creation Tools

Microsoft Office: Office 365 offers access to cloud versions of Word, Excel, PowerPoint, and OneNote. It offers the capability for multiple employees to author and collaborate on documents no matter their locations.

Workflow Management

PowerApps: PowerApps provides a tool for developing applications without using a coding language. Non-coders can create applications that connect to data in the system or in third-party applications. The resulting apps can run on the internet, iOS, and Android devices.

Flow: This application allows users to automate a process or workflow. The real power comes from using PowerApps and Flow together to create applications that automate workflow.

Implementing a full-featured Office 365 system will touch almost everyone in your organization. If you have a strong change management team, and an expert IT team, you’re in a good position to guide the organization through. However, sometimes an outside partner can bring the additional expertise that will make achieving your goals that much quicker and easier. Working with Datavail, you can take advantage of the expertise of a Microsoft Gold Partner who can design, configure, and support a digital workplace, end-to-end.

You’ll realize the flexibility and power of the cloud without sacrificing reliability and security. Our team numbers more than 1,000 people and we have a deep understanding of how to align technology with long-term strategic goals. To learn more download our white paper: The Modern Workplace: How to Navigate Your Journey to Office 365.