Office 365 for Small Business offers a lot of value in 2023. The most common package we recommend to small businesses is Office 365 Standard. This package offers the following:

• The Office Package to install your your computer – in fact you can install on 5 other computers for the same user account
• Email hosting where your domain is setup on the Office 365 Platform
• Onedrive for Business for each user licensed
• Sharepoint so that all business documents can be centrally accessed by all in the company
• Microsoft Teams for Organizational Collaboration.

An attractive feature of signing up directly on Microsoft’s site is that you have the potential of getting 1 month’s trial with no costs for licensing upfront. However, you will need to offset this with setting up the services which will require some technical expertise. In order to setup services, your domain has to configured to enable Office 365 services. Your environment needs to be assessed so that all users are prepared to use the platform. Old computers running Windows 7 and employees who have unreliable internet connection would put a spanner in the works.

Office 365 for Small Business in 2022 has a lot of tools which businesses can use:

• Microsoft Booking – online booking system which is available to the public to use a company calendar to book appointments.
• Microsoft Stream – a lot of businesses are creating video content for internal use and the platform provides an internal platform that provides YouTube like functionality for company use. This ensures no public access to company sensitive access. 
• Microsoft Power Apps – the ability to build simple apps for workflow processes across the company.
• Microsoft Delve – provides insight on who is working on what document company wide – don’t panic! It only shows documents that people have permission to see. However this is a great tool to get a sense on the focus of work and breaks down the silo’s most small business have to contend with in groups.
• Microsoft Planner – a very powerful task management tool which allows small companies to use a surprising rich feature set to keep track of tasks assigned to employees.
• Microsoft Lists – Most times, Microsoft Excel is misused as it is the simplest tool to use columns and rows to order information. Enter Microsoft Lists which overcome a lot downsides to using Excel.

There are a number of other tools Microsoft provides access to. What we have found is that is really benefits any organisation when evaluating Office 365, to get an introduction and demonstration to all the features above so that decision makers can assess what would be of benefit to the organisation on initial setup. You don’t know what you don’t know – this becomes all the more apparent when exploring all the features of the Office 365 platform. Using technology to streamline processes and ultimately save time to the company makes sense when investing in the platform – who better to provide you with this insight than the IT company that assists you in setting this up.

Should you be considering Microsoft Office 365 in 2023, we would love to hear from you. Please fill in the contact form below for a free initial consultation on your investigation into the platform.