Get the most out of your Office365 Subscription

Your business may already be using Office365 Business or Enterprise for your Hosted Email or Office Software, but we bet you are not aware of all of the other features available in an Office365 subscription.  The best part is that these features are already included in your Office365 subscription (depending on the specific subscription you have). That means more productivity for your company at no additional monthly cost!

Microsoft Teams

Included With Office365 Business Essentials, Business Premium, and all Enterprise plans:

Microsoft Teams is a chat-centered work-space that offers the ability for your organization to work together more effectively. This platform acts as a hub for your group and provides team chat conversations, shared documents, video conferencing through meetings, and screen sharing for presentations, with a seamless experience from mobile to laptop to desktop. Microsoft Teams has very granular permissions that allow you to lock down information in the hub to just those individuals that require access.

Each organization can set up multiple teams which can be used for different departments, projects, lines of business or locations.   Teams offers a way to easily access and work in files stored in Sharepoint or shared notebooks in OneNote. Fun features like reactions, GIFS, and praise give employees a way to interact socially in a controlled environment.   Businesses can even invite guests to Teams channels to discuss and plan projects that have members outside the organization.  It is easy to search across your entire Teams instance and searches will run across chat messages, documents, and more.

Teams will also integrate with third party services like Trello, Hootsuite, Dropbox, Box, and Google Drive.

Microsoft Planner

Included With Office365 Business Essentials, Business Premium, and all Enterprise plans:

Planner is a tool that offers a Kanban-style board that allows businesses a visual way to organize teamwork.  This application allows you to organize work Plans that can be assigned tasks.  Tasks can have file attachments, due dates, assignments, photos, notes, and statuses and can be moved to different buckets by dragging and dropping or assigned to different people and given different due dates.  Planner integrates easily into the Teams hub as an additional tab.

OneDrive

Included With Office365 Business Essentials, Business Premium, and all Enterprise plans:

Each Office365 license includes OneDrive. This is a personal folder that allows you to sync files from your computer to the cloud. Files that are stored in OneDrive are automatically saved as you are working on them, preventing issues with lost work due to applications crashing. Data is accessible from anywhere with a web browser, and these saved files can be shared with others.  Files backed up to One Drive can be accessed even if an employee has left the company or the original computer is lost, stolen or unable to boot.  Files in One Drive allow employees to co-author documents. OneDrive has robust mobile apps that allow you to access your files from mobile devices.

Sharepoint

Included With Office365 Business Essentials, Business Premium, and all Enterprise plans:

All of the capabilities of Sharepoint are probably beyond the scope of this article, but on its most basic level, Sharepoint allows companies to have a central file repository, much like a file server, with granular permissions to documents and folders, allowing most companies to move away from saving documents on an in-house server.  These documents can be accessed from anywhere with an internet connection, reducing the need for employees to use VPN to access files on a server.

Real-Time Co-Authoring

Available for all Files saved in Sharepoint, Teams, or OneDrive

Files saved to OneDrive or Sharepoint can be edited by multiple people in different locations, on different devices all at the same time. Changes made by anyone working on the document will show to all participants in real-time with flags to indicate who made the change. Changes are automatically saved to OneDrive or Sharepoint. Users can even chat with each other directly within the office application or can use the voice chat capabilities from within the Teams hub.

OneNote

Included with All Office Products and as a free download

OneNote is, at its heart, a note-taking tool.  Businesses can create team notebooks to handle information currently scattered across multiple folders or binders. Different notebooks can be created for various departments, and then each notebook can have multiple sections. For instance, the HR department could have a notebook, and in that notebook, there could be different sections for OnBoarding, OffBoarding, Benefits, etc.  OneNote can easily clip videos, photos, drawings, voice files or webpages directly to pages in the different sections. Pages that are worked on by multiple people flag each person’s entry to make knowing who was responsible for changes easy and all pages have versioning to roll back any unwanted changes. OneNote offers a very robust search which will search across all notebooks the employee has access to find any matching entries. All sections and pages can be encrypted with 128-bit AES encryption.

Microsoft Bookings

Included With Office365 Business Essentials, Business Premium and as a free addon to all Enterprise plans:

Microsoft Bookings is an online and mobile app for businesses that do work on an appointment basis, such as law firms, hair salons, and doctor’s offices.  This application allows customers to book appointments directly through your website or Facebook business page.  Customers can schedule appointments with specific staff members and/or particular services. Staff members can see all of their bookings, access customer lists, and make manual bookings on the back end. Administrators can define staff lists, staff availability, services, pricing, and business hours. Administrators can customize the scheduling of services and staff. You can even automatically send appointment reminders!

Shifts for Teams

Included With Office365 Business Essentials, Business Premium and all Enterprise plans:

Shifts is a cloud-based application that lets managers set schedules for their employees.  Employees can use Shifts for Teams to request time off, trade shifts with other people, check schedules, or communicate with other employees or managers. Managers can create schedules, send team news or announcements. This application is mobile-optimized, making it very easy for employees to check their shifts on the go.  Shifts also allows employees to clock in and out and track breaks.

MileIQ

Office365 Business Premium Only

Keeping track of mileage for reporting purposes is tedious.  MileIQ by Microsoft makes tracking mileage easier by working in the background as you drive.  Miles are automatically logged and recorded based on the work hours that you set.  Users can manually classify rides in the app, and MileIQ will automatically classify frequent drives on your behalf. The MileIQ Dashboard is available on your desktop or laptop, and from there, you can bulk classify, add locations, and view reports.

Microsoft Stream

Enterprise Only

Microsoft Stream allows business to deliver live and on-demand events through Office 365 for up to 10000 attendees and offers a platform to store and share your companies video presentations with advanced features like auto-generated closed captions, and face detection, Stream is the ideal place to store and share company content like training videos.

Not all businesses will need or even want all of the features that are included with an Office365 subscription, but it is important for all subscribers to know that there is a world of additional features available to them above and beyond Office applications and hosted email.

If you are using these services, remember to back them up!

Are you in the New Orleans area? AC3 can help you get the most from your existing Office365 subscription or assist you with migrating to Office365 services! We would be happy to help new or existing customers take advantage of any features that would benefit your company. Talk to an information technology specialist or email us at support@ac3it.com with any questions!