Office 365 provides you with online versions of popular business tools like Microsoft Word, Excel, PowerPoint and Outlook. But if that’s all you know about it, you’re missing out on some of the biggest benefits it offers your business. We explore four of the core advantages of an Office 365 subscription.
For more information about Office 365 at Rackspace please visit: https://www.rackspace.com/office-365
1. 4 WAYS OFFICE 365
EMPOWERS SMALL
BUSINESSES
Office 365 provides you with online versions of popular business tools like Microsoft
Word, Excel, PowerPoint and Outlook. But if that’s all you know about it, you’re missing
out on some of the biggest benefits it offers your small business. Let’s look at four of the
core advantages of an Office 365 subscription:
2. #1: TAKE CONTROL
OVER YOUR EMAIL
PROBLEM: Office 365 is the first hosted
email platform to give you the admin-level
control and feature sets of a traditional on-
premise platform. Until recently, choosing
an email solution required you make a
choice. You could use hosted email and
pay a set cost per mailbox, which reduced
your IT infrastructure costs but sacrificed
a lot of features. Or you could make an
expensive upfront investment and host
your own server to keep administrative
control in-house.
3. SOLUTION: Office 365 offers the best of both worlds.
Because you pay per user, you avoid costly balloon
payments and can easily scale according to your
business needs. And Office 365’s full set of IT admin
features, which you can access anytime from your
desktop or mobile device, gives you the account control
you require without the financial or productivity drain
of purchasing and maintaining your own servers.
A realty company, for example, has been using the
flexibility of PowerShell scripting to transition into
a shared mailbox architecture (a helpful and free
resource for multiple employees to utilize a shared
corporate account) that previously wasn’t available
as an option. Having the ability to script in PowerShell
means less manual work for IT and faster turnaround.
#1: TAKE CONTROL
OVER YOUR EMAIL
4. #2: ENSURE SEAMLESS
EXPERIENCE ACROSS
DEVICES
PROBLEM: Neither you nor your
employees likely spend the entire day
sitting in front of a desktop computer.
You work in the office, at home, on the
road and at various points in between.
Which means you need access to reliable
tools wherever you happen to be.
5. SOLUTION: Microsoft recognizes this and
prioritizes developing Office 365 in an effort
called Mobile First. Many platforms still follow
the model of developing desktop software
first, which typically leads to stripped-down
mobile versions that are clunky to use. By
putting mobile first, Office 365 ensures you
get the same user experience on a laptop
or desktop computer, tablet or smartphone.
For one of our customers, a film production
company, this enables its employees to be
productive whether they’re in the office, on
location, or travelling in between.
#2: ENSURE SEAMLESS
EXPERIENCE ACROSS
DEVICES
6. #3: ENJOY THE LATEST
AND GREATEST VERSION
PROBLEM: Remember when you had to wait
several years to get a major update to your
software? Or you had to suffer through a
difficult and time-consuming migration to
get your employees up to speed with the
newest version?
7. SOLUTION: Office 365 is constantly developing and evolving to meet
the business needs of customers, being one of Microsoft’s first
evergreen solutions. New feature sets can roll out in as little as 90
days and are automatically deployed to all of your users. This past
summer, for example, Microsoft Planner was rolled out to Office 365
customers worldwide. No action by Office 365 admins was needed, as
the Planner tile simply appeared in users’ Office 365 app launcher.
This recently helped a magazine and publishing company that had
reorganized their teams and projects around Office 365 Groups to
take advantage of Planner’s teamwork capabilities. When Planner was
introduced into Groups, the teams were able to easily integrate it into
their workflow — and organize and accomplish tasks more quickly.
#3: ENJOY THE LATEST
AND GREATEST VERSION
8. #4: RELY ON RACKSPACE’S
FANATICAL SUPPORT
PROBLEM: You’ve got a business to run
and we know that when it comes to
migrating to Office 365 and training your
employees to use it, your time, energy
and resources are limited. That’s why our
Fanatical Support comes with your Office
365 subscription.
9. SOLUTION: If you possess the technical knowledge,
you can use our service tools to migrate your email,
set up user accounts and perform other processes
to get yourself up and running. If you want more
assistance, a dedicated Rackspace Fanatical Support
staff member will partner with you to guide you
through each step of the migration process. They’ll
also be available 24x7x365 for any ongoing support
you may need, such as troubleshooting software
issues or helping you understand new app features
and how they can enable you and your employees
be more effective. After all, our success depends on
your success. We’ll work as hard as you do to make
your business a success.
#4: RELY ON RACKSPACE’S
FANATICAL SUPPORT
10. Read more about how Office 365 and Rackspace can help empower your small business:
https://www.rackspace.com/office-365
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