Microsoft’s Office 365 subscription plan offers great value for your business through email service, desktop Office apps, and more. We’ve previously discussed the benefits of using Office 365 email instead of a personal provider like Yahoo for your small business, but Office 365 is valuable even if you don’t fall into that use case.
Let’s take a look at the attractive package Office 365 offers and how it can supercharge your firm’s productivity.
Flexible Plans That Offer What You Need
Office 365 for business isn’t a one-size-fits-all solution. You can select from several plans to pay for only what you need. If you just want to make the Microsoft Office suite available to your employees, you can pay for a plan that doesn’t include email. Likewise, if you already have a license for Microsoft Office apps like Word and Excel, you can subscribe to an email-only plan.
Whichever plan you choose, they’re all scalable as you pay per user. If you pay for 15 users and an employee leaves, you can simply deactivate their account and assign it to their replacement.
Gain Ease of Use From Cloud Software
Maintaining your own in-house email servers is cumbersome. The burden on you and your IT team to fix them if something goes wrong, which would result in downtime for your employees. With Office 365’s cloud-based approach, the service “just works.” Microsoft guarantees 99.9% uptime so you can trust that your email and other Office resources will be there when you need them.
In addition, if you choose a plan with Office desktop apps included, lifetime updates are included. Say Office 2016 is the current version when you subscribe to Office 365. If Microsoft releases Office 2018 two years later, everyone will get the newer version free. This makes for a painless upgrade process and doesn’t cost you a huge amount down the road.
Another benefit is the amount of email storage. Office 365 includes a generous 50 GB of mail storage for every user. That’s probably a lot more than your current provider allows for.
Easy Sync Among Employees
It’s a pain to cobble together solutions when your programs don’t mesh well together. Emailing files back and forth, calendar sync problems, and contact lists that only exist on one computer only decrease productivity. But because Office 365 is designed for teams, these problems disappear when you use it.
Everyone using your new Office email can create shared calendar, enabling employees in the same department can stay updated in real-time. OneDrive lets them create shared folders in the cloud, eliminating the need for clunky emailing which can result in lost files. Each tool in the Office 365 kit plays nicely with the others, and when all your staff are using them, they can work better in-sync than ever.
It’s Professional
As we mentioned in the article comparing personal email to Office 365, using the latter creates a more professional face for your company. Sending out emails with an AOL domain doesn’t result in a polished appearance.
In addition, Office 365 includes powerful security features from Microsoft. These safeguard your data, email, and allow you to enact your own controls for users too.
Get Access to Office Apps Everywhere
We mentioned plans that include Office desktop apps get free updates to new versions. But Office 365 also includes access to mobile versions of Office as well as Office online. In fact, each user can install Office on five different machines. This lets them install it on their home office machine as well as their computer in your building.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ULHJR_zIl3g
Mobile apps let employees make quick changes to documents and review them, even when on-the-go. And Office Online, while limited compared to the desktop versions, lets you work in basic versions of Word, Excel, and PowerPoint for small edits. Thus even if someone’s computer is in for repairs, they’ll still have access to the Office apps they need.
Office 365 is Affordable and Powerful
Most businesses need Microsoft Office and an email service. Office 365 combines them into an easy price and throws in lots of extra benefits to boot. The licensing is much simpler than juggling various versions of Office around your company, its availability is guaranteed, and the synchronization features can’t be beaten.
We recommend Office 365 to anyone looking for an email and/or Microsoft Office solution, and we’d be happy to help you implement it into your business. Contact us today to set up a consultation.