07 Jul Team work made fun with Office 365
Team work made fun with Office 365
Collaborating within a team can lead to better engaged staff and increased productivity, with projects completed sooner and at a higher quality. Collaborating can improve idea generation and output. Many hours of team work each working week are wasted by staff tracking down emails and information. According to Mckinsey Global Institute (with IDC data), productivity gains of 20-25% could be made with improved social communication and collaboration technologies.
Figure 1http://www.mckinsey.com/industries/high-tech/our-insights/the-social-economy
Office 365’s is a subscription service from Microsoft including powerful online collaboration tools to help your team work as efficiently as possible.
Realise the Possibilities
No one wants to send 5 emails back and forth to decide on a meeting time! With Office 365 you can share your calendars and easily schedule a time to meet when everyone’s free. And instead of finding a room or needing everyone to travel to the same building, why not video conference and save travel time. When you finish the meeting and need to compile some notes, instead of emailing around the one document and recompiling notes out of order, with Office 365 you can all collaborate in real-time on the same document. When you want to send the notes or report to others, it’s much easier to give them a link to a document that is always up to date rather than sending them a copy only to realise it’s out of date already! All Office 365 plans come with OneDrive, for document sharing and storage and some plans also include SharePoint for document storage and business knowledge sharing in within a web portal.
Collaborate on Notes and Documents
Saving OneNote notebooks and Word documents to OneDrive or on SharePoint enables the documents to be co-authored in real-time, seeing everyone’s changes as they happen. With documents stored in OneDrive or SharePoint and sharing activated, people with the link to the document can see your changes and make modifications to the document or notebook. In Microsoft Word, collaborators are notified when other users join (or leave) the document and coloured flags show where each user is currently typing. Most Office 365 plans come with desktop versions of Microsoft Office programs.
Saving time and money with online meetings and scheduling
Online scheduling and shared calendars with Office 365 lets you effortlessly see your colleagues’ availability and helps you plan meetings when everyone’s free. Skype for Business provides an easy to use video conferencing system for up to 250 participants in the same conference. Collaboration features include one-click screen sharing to demonstrate that new application feature or presentation and real-time note taking with OneNote.
While on the video conference Skype for Business automatically indicates the current speaker and all participant’s names, keeping everyone involved in the conversation.
You can still use traditional instant messaging if you prefer and audio calls without needing webcams. Skype for Business can even work with Skype itself, for collaborating with people outside your organisation!
Share files with your team
Storing files in OneDrive increases your productivity allowing you to work from any computer or device and give you peace of mind that your hard work is safe. In a team environment, documents can be shared with others allowing painless viewing and collaboration all on the latest version! Now all of your colleagues can access the latest versions each other’s documents all on their preferred platform. Even other files types such as Adobe PDF, graphic files, Visio charts (and many more) can be shared and previewed online inside OneDrive.
For more advanced document sharing, SharePoint can be used to manage shared files and folders within teams and with greater control over access permissions.
Plan and Manage your team
Team management and planning can be a pain – trying to keep track of your tasks that may be spread across multiple emails and projects, let alone trying to manage your team’s tasks! Microsoft Planner is a new service available with Office 365 business plans, which helps teams organise their project work and maintain the project schedules. With Planner, you can quickly see an overview of the project completion including due dates for various sub-tasks you might add, and by assigning team members to tasks, everyone can see who is working on what!
Office documents and media can be attached tasks saving everyone time to hunt around for the report or asset. Your team can also make comments directly on a task, keeping all relevant discussion contained. Of course, Microsoft Planner integrates well with other Office 365 features including shared OneNote notebooks and real-time collaborative document co-authoring. Project teams in Planner integrate with Groups across other Office 365 applications for group calendars, documents, emails, and Notebooks.
Connect Privately
Yammer is Office 365’s private, organisation-centric social media platform. With a social media platform just for your business, you can communicate, connect and engage across the organisation as easily on public social media platforms. You can post updates and news, and search and discover new activity within the business, all using paradigms similar to other social platforms. And Yammer also integrates with the rest of Office 365 and sharing features.
The Possibilities Are Here
Office 365 provides all the tools you need to get your business collaborating effectively, from document and calendar sharing to online meetings and team planning. Office 365 subscription plans vary in price depending on online features and software included. See our post, 4 Things you didn’t know about Office 365 for further information or talk with an Office 365 specialist at CT4.