Our team has been busy assisting our clients with the transition to work from home. This change in operation is not always simple or smooth, however having the right tools in place goes a long way to support that change in operation and thinking!

Microsoft 365 (previously Office 365) offers many powerful and flexible tools to assist with your team collaboration both in office and for remote workers.

Real time document co-authoring
See collaborators’ changes in real time when working in Word, Excel or PowerPoint. Everything saves to OneDrive or Sharepoint and version control lets everyone see who made which changes and when.

Within app Teams chat
Complementing the above is the ability to use 365’s collaboration tool – Microsoft Teams – for chatting within your document. Video call, message and share your screen without leaving your document’s application.

A special note must be made about Teams’ video calling. With features such as blurring your home office background and the option to record/transcribe the meeting, it’s a long way from the old and clunky Skype experience.

OneNote
This neat little app lets team members share their notes easily and keeps them organised. Anything written offline will immediately update as soon as connection is restored.

Advanced Threat Protection
Covid-19 opportunist scammers are on the prowl. Thankfully, 365’s Advanced Threat Protection is a powerful cloud-based email filtering service that provides an extra layer of security for email based attacks.

Mobile Device Manager
Employees accessing company resources from anywhere can be a security risk. 365’s mobile device manager allows for an organisation’s IT team to wipe any data if a device gets into the wrong hands or becomes infected with malware.

Speaking of security, 365 can be set up to ask for both a password and biometric data like a fingerprint scan. Twice the hurdle for hackers.

Outlook and Calendar
A full email management system, Outlook also lets you see everyone’s calendar so you can set meetings and view everyone’s availability at a glance. It neatly integrates with Teams, allowing for meetings to be broadcast directly into co-workers’ calendars and started with a few clicks.

Work within email
As with Teams, Outlook also lets you access and edit a file directly from your Outlook window. This document will save and update in real time as you and your co-workers make changes. Using SharePoint you can even enable notifications to shout whenever anyone edits a file.

Office Lens
In our ever paperless world, scanners are becoming rarer. As part of the iOS and Android versions of OneNote, Office Lens serves to turn your phone into a mobile scanner. Ideal for design teams and whiteboarding sessions.

Planner
If you want something a little deeper for managing projects than To Do, Planner lets a project manager create plans, set due dates, organise and assign tasks etc. using email notifications and visual dashboards. It’s basically the project manager’s command centre. Future updates will take this task management tool to the next level.

Whew… that’s a great deal of functionality, but Microsoft pulls it off by allowing each element to exist with the others and operate together…seamlessly.

Our team at ADS use these tools daily – speak to us for more information