Microsoft was founded in 1975. That means well nearly 45 years and dozens of products, all leading to a mass confusion of what Microsoft has to offer your business and which products are actually useful in your workflows.
Microsoft actually offers a full breadth of business applications that many people are either under-utilizing or not even using. There are so many different products your head might spin if we were to list every single one out.
As one of the major business tech companies out there, Microsoft has tried to answer a majority of your business needs, many of which seem to overlap. In an effort to consolidate offerings and to move business applications into the cloud, Microsoft created Office 365 products to address growing demands within the modern business.
Microsoft Office 365 provides its users with both basic application productivity that has become necessary to get work done in the modern workplace. Productivity applications include, but are not limited to, a word processor, a spreadsheet, an email client, a calendar, and a presentation application.
Here are some of the applications currently associated with Office 365:
Word— this application remains most business’ go-to when it comes to word processing, providing all of the expected features present in the latest version of Microsoft Word.
Excel—spreadsheet workhorse that continues to be used across businesses for organization, finance and analytics.
Outlook— managing email and calendars similar to the standalone product. The app has been around for many years and its busy interface tends to be either loved or hated by users
PowerPoint— allowing users the ability to communicate information to a group of individuals at a meeting often involves a presentation.
Publisher – communicating information to a broader audience requires something more permanent and more formal than a presentation at a meeting.
OneNote—as the need to capture information on the go has become the norm in business, this application allows users to take notes on any device and retrieve them on any other device. Basically, OneNote has become a widely used tool to increase productivity on the go.
OneDrive—OneDrive is a cloud-storage and file sharing platform that allows your co-workers to collaborate with you on projects. OneDrive differs from SharePoint in that OneDrive only provides storage and sharing. SharePoint has additional collaborative features. To sum things up, OneDrive is essentially an online folder system for file storage, whereas SharePoint includes many other features such as collaboration, CMS, and dashboards. Within Office 365, your users have up to 1 TB of cloud storage within OneDrive.
SharePoint—SharePoint on the surface is a similar product to OneDrive (see above). It is a cloud-based document collaboration product. But unlike OneDrive, SharePoint provides extra collaboration features, including sites, workflows, lists and calendars. These tools are meant to make an individual’s collaborative efforts more organized and visible, with notifications and documents, automated tasks and calendar views. One quick note to all of you using Office 365—Office 365 now includes some of SharePoint’s features within the platform. SharePoint is only found in the Business Premium versions of Office 365.
Teams—Teams is Microsoft’s chat platform for intracompany collaboration, including video conferencing. Microsoft has intended on Teams replacing Skype for Business. Users can create separate threaded channels with different teams, allowing them to chat, call, or video chat. Teams can sync with other Office 365 products, which enables easier sharing of documents, videos and images. Microsoft Teams is more of a collaboration tool than Skype has to offer.
Flow—Flow allows your team to create automated workflows between your favorite/critical applications and services. By automating certain tasks (for instance, following anyone that hashtags your business on Twitter) your users can eliminate repetitive tasks in their day-to-day workflows.
Skype for Business—With Skype for Business, enterprises can host unlimited online and video conferencing meetings with up to 250 people.
There are a ton of features in Office 365. Part of the challenge is figuring out what is available to you and what could actually help your business run smoother.
