Make the most of your investment with these Office 365 tips

If you’ve taken the time and spent money migrating to the Office 365, you’re going to want to extract the maximum possible value for your money. Simply buying Office 365 licenses doesn’t guarantee success. Luckily, there are a number of ways you can ensure your business gets the most out of your Office 365 investment. Here’s some Office 365 tips to demonstrate the best ways to do this.

Encourage collaboration

Launched in 2017, Microsoft Teams is the Office 365’s all-purpose business collaboration solution. It combines live chat, filesharing, and video conferencing features into one accessible interface that interacts seamlessly with the other apps in your Office 365 network.

One of the many benefits of Microsoft Teams is that it reads contact information from the same source as Outlook, meaning meetings scheduled via email can be seamlessly initiated in Teams. It also integrates with other Microsoft apps like Word and Excel, making it easy to open and edit shared files entirely within the Teams interface. Ultimately, it facilitates live communication between the members of your team – no matter where they’re working.

Quick and effortless collaboration means that workers have fast and efficient access to the information they need and can easily work on the go or from remote locations. This advantage alone provides tangible ROI on your Office 365 investment, by improving productivity and facilitating the fast exchange of ideas and information.

Manage your network more efficiently

Cloud subscription packages are charged based on the amount of ‘seats’ or ‘users’ your company has. When people leave, you need to make sure their accounts are reassigned or removed to avoid paying for licenses that aren’t being used.

Network managers require clear view of permissions across their O365 platform so they can see who has access to what, and ensure the right people can access the files they need – and the wrong people can’t.

In Office 365, these permissions can be difficult to easily uncover. It’s important to partner with third party managed cloud providers that offer these services, to ensure complete visibility over your platform. Paying the right amount for your plan and securing your network are essential parts of maximizing the value you get from your Office 365 network.

Help adoption

Office 365 is certainly good for your business, but there’s no point making the shift if your workers aren’t going to take advantage of it. There’s a large range of different apps available across the platform – and it’s challenging to ensure all users make best use of what’s available. Users tend to use the tools and apps they’re familiar with, and it’s important to ensure they’re using the best tools available to efficiently get their jobs done.

As well as this, however, it’s important to ensure users use the same tools and applications. What happens, for instance, if one half of your organization save their files on OneDrive, and the other on their hard drives? This leads to information silos and potentially to delays in processes which can have a negative effect on your bottom line.

Your business is most effective when everyone uses the same tools to complete their tasks. Disparate tools and applications don’t make for a cohesive business infrastructure. The cloud allows users to access files anywhere – whether they’re in the office or working remotely. However, this is contingent on everyone understanding and using the correct processes for storing documents and other data.

For this reason, maintaining a fully productive Office 365 platform requires the ability to monitor usage, as well as properly training workers on the processes and tools to adopt. By understanding the ways Office 365 is used, you can begin to implement policies to help improve adoption across the whole company.

Office 365 tips: Choose the right partner

The office 365 tips discussed here should help you understand why so many businesses decide to do move to the cloud with an expert partner to help them along on the journey. The cloud has clear advantages over legacy IT platforms – but it needs to be properly managed and maintained to ensure you get the best from your investment.

MessageOps are expert cloud service providers who have help thousands of users install and get a great return from Office 365. Our product, Inscape365 (which comes free with our services) is a sophisticated Office 365 management solution, that is the perfect fix to disorganized, disconnected, and unproductive Office 365 networks. It’s an all-in-one service that gives your administrators better overview of how your platform is being used. It can help ensure the pitfalls and complications that many companies encounter in the cloud are successfully navigated and avoided.

Services like staff adoption training, as well as app and license management are included within the Inscape365 package – meaning it’s easier than ever to ensure you’re constantly getting the most out of your Office 365 environment.

If you want to find out more about Inscape365 and managed cloud license services, get in touch with the team here.