Microsoft Office is the most common form of software used in the world. Its reach is incredible with 1.2 billion users worldwide and 60 million using the cloud version called Office 365. As a platform for businesses to share and collaborate on information it’s almost without parallel and now you can leverage the investment your company has made in Office 365 by embedding it in your company intranet. Combining both powerful tools in a single cloud-based platform will lead to efficiency savings and enhanced productivity with anytime, anywhere access. Interested in finding out more? In this post, we look at some of the advantages of using Microsoft Office 365 with your company intranet.
Microsoft Office 365 And The Intranet – Advantages
Open All Hours
The single most important advantage of embedding Office 365 in your intranet is that staff members no longer need to be in the office to get work done. This enhanced mobility is a great boost to productivity as employees can be working for you whether they are visiting a client in a different city, attending a conference in a different country, working remotely or telecommuting. The intranet and Office 365 will work in harmony so that, for example, a field technician that is out on a job can simply log on to the intranet and update the Excel spreadsheet directly once a job has been completed. The update takes place in real time and the great beauty is that another field technician or head office administrator can be simultaneously working on the spreadsheet at the same time. Whenever the spreadsheet is altered by any user the data is automatically updated in the cloud. In addition, the embedded spreadsheet gives you the ability to create management dashboards and graphs or reports. And so the data in that field technician Excel spreadsheet can be used to create a graph at the end of the day which reports on all the jobs that have been completed on time.
Better Collaboration And Joint Working
The intranet and Office 365 working together creates more opportunities for staff to collaborate. Word documents for example, or indeed any MS Office program, can be directly embedded in the relevant intranet page so that there’s no need to physically open the document. You simply start working on it directly. The document is automatically updated on the intranet page which, therefore, always has the latest version.
It may be that you are you currently working on a company-wide document – a recruitment and retention policy say for example? How many versions of the draft document have you had to email around the office for comments and amendments? How often have colleagues sent you comments on the wrong version of the document? How much time have you wasted sifting through your email inbox making sure that you’ve collated all the feedback from your colleagues? Chances are the whole process has taken multiple emails and many minutes of your time.
Well, Office 365 working with the company intranet will do away with this labour-intensive process. The draft recruitment and retention policy can be embedded directly in the relevant business intranet page. The intranet will provide a very useful context with information on the aims and objectives for the revised policy so that all contributors have a common understanding. Using a series of page permissions set through the intranet, contributors can simultaneously create content, edit or comment on the draft policy with all updates saved in real time. The organizational efficiency gains to be had in terms of saving time and the duplication of effort are obvious. What’s more, it will be a much easier and smoother process for the users to actually get their work done.
Improved Search Capability
Being able to quickly and easily locate information is, of course, a priority in any business. And the combination of Office 365 and the intranet will allow for just that in your company. You see, the intranet will provide that all-important context, making the search results more visual and meaningful for users. Most file management systems search by file or folder names only. Searching on an intranet with embedded Office 365 will present results that provide images as well as context. It’s a much more intuitive way to organize documents and is a far a more engaging experience for users.
Easy To Manage
An integrated platform with no ongoing maintenance of hardware, no downtime, enhanced security, and no need to upgrade or back up, sounds too good to be true? Well, that’s the very real offering available with a cloud intranet and Office 365.
Contrary to what you might think, the security of your data is probably stronger with the cloud option. Both Microsoft and the cloud intranet provider will utilize the very latest, best practice security features including two-way SSL encryption and Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act compliant applications such as Amazon Web Servers. Keeping on top of online security trends is part and parcel of the day job for Microsoft and your intranet provider and so your data really is in safe hands.
What’s more, with this option you no longer need to worry about upgrading and updating individual MS Office programs or the functionality of your intranet. All of this is automatically done for you in the cloud.
Had enough of the system going down? Then cloud computing is definitely the way to go. With typically 99.9 percent up time, why not do away with annoying company servers and email exchanges forever? And without expensive company servers to house, maintain and upgrade, think of how much more money will be available in your IT budget to deploy on other priorities.
Free Intranet Demo And Trial Offer
At the end of the day the choice is a relatively simple one. There’s no doubt that cloud computing is the future for businesses, especially small to medium-sized enterprises. The open-all-hours nature of the modern marketplace means that you have to be able to access your documents and business tools 24/7. And in order to stay competitive and one step ahead of the others, you need to take advantage of every opportunity. Think about how productive and streamlined your operation could be with an intranet and Microsoft Office 365 working in partnership. Enhanced opportunities for collaboration, rationalized automated business processes and increased productivity are all within your reach. Contact us at MyHub today for a free demo and consultancy session showing how simple it is to embed Microsoft Office 365 documents into your intranet.
“Most document management systems search by file or folder names only.”
Your absolutely wrong there. Most document management systems search by everything in the profile and keywords within the documents.
You are quite right, not sure how that got through our editorial process, I’ve updated it so that it now reads “Most file management systems search by file or folder names only.” Thank you for pointing that out to us, great and much-appreciated feedback.