Is Your Team Using Microsoft 365 to its Full Potential?

Microsoft Office’s suite of applications are famous, with Word, Excel, and PowerPoint becoming almost generic terms for word processing, spreadsheet generation, and presentation creation. While these three applications certainly have their value in the office, there’s a lot of other capabilities that the Microsoft 365 platform adds that take it to the next level.

Let’s dive into a few of these capabilities, and—most pertinently—how these features benefit Texas businesses.

What Benefits are Built Into Microsoft 365?

Microsoft 365 and its delivery model encourage a few key business advantages:

The Interconnected Nature of Office’s Additional Applications Promotes Collaboration

While the aforementioned Office programs are the most well-known of Microsoft’s workplace applications, there are other options included that today’s businesses would benefit from using—many of which play nicely with one another, and encourage your team to work together on shared tasks. OneDrive and Teams, for instance, are designed for collaboration. OneDrive provides you with a shared storage space for your team to operate within, while Teams provides you with a collaborative platform to communicate on, both internally and externally.

The Subscription Model Helps Manage Costs and Keep Licensing Straightforward

The days of purchasing Microsoft Office as a one-off product are essentially behind us. About a decade ago, it made some fiscal sense to purchase Office (or the individual apps that you needed) and use them for a year or two longer than intended. Then, you would save up the budget to buy the latest version for most of your users and rinse and repeat. This usually saved businesses a few cents on the dollar in the long run, which is why the subscription model was hard to swallow at first.

But there are merits to it. Yes, Microsoft gets you on a recurring payment plan, but they’ve added so much additional value to the suite of tools that it can really make a big difference if your business were to embrace it. Plus, it makes compatibility and security so much easier, because everyone is using the latest version of Word, and everyone can open all of the same documents without running into compatibility issues.

Plus business owners stop running the risk of getting cease and desist letters from the Business Software Alliance (BSA), an organization that thrives on catching small businesses in the act of misusing their software licenses. Microsoft Office has historically been a huge cash cow for them, and they often work hard to advertise to managers and employees offering cash rewards for snitching on organizations that aren’t following the rules.

The subscription model is designed to inherently prevent that, so while it’s harder to break the law to save money (which you definitely should not attempt to do), it really gives you little option to make you a target for lawsuits.

The Delivery of Microsoft 365 Ensures a Consistent Solution for All

Finally, the fact that Microsoft 365 is delivered via the cloud ensures that a business that subscribes to it and its benefits will have access to the best available version of the programs they need to use. Updates don’t need to be managed, and all upkeep is on Microsoft.

This also ensures that your entire team is sure to be using the same version of the software involved, helping to keep everyone on the same page.

Microsoft 365 can be a great resource for your business, and we can help you put it in place. Give us a call at (512) 343-8891 to get started.