If there is one thing that small business owners know, it’s that time is precious. Anything that can improve our efficiency is a good thing, right? IT has promised a lot, but doesn’t always deliver fully on it’s promise. Software that doesn’t quite work well together, things that break and complexity are some of the common challenges we’ve all faced.
When it comes to a modern business, there’s an emphasis on communication and collaboration. We frequently need to work with others to manage our business, to produce our products or services and to service our customers.
Large enterprises have long opted to move toward a ‘cloud service’ model for email, business applications and collaboration. This eliminates the need to run these services yourself (and the headaches that come with that) and enables close integration between software applications.
One of the two big players in this space is Microsoft, with their Office 365 offering. Available in a variety of flavours, Microsoft have bundled a number of their most productive services together, offering them at predictive, recurring cost-per-user. Many businesses might not know that there is a great Office 365 package which could address the needs of many small businesses. It’s called Office 365 Business Essentials, we’ll call it O365BE.
O365BE has one significant change from how we’re used to working: it doesn’t give you Word, Excel, PowerPoint and friends on your computer. However, you do get web-based versions of these applications—accessible from anywhere, which offer most of the features of the desktop software versions. You can still open, create and share documents, it’s just the way you do it is different. Since we’re now in a mobile world, the mobile (smartphone and tablet) versions of these applications is included for up to 5 phones and 5 tablets per user.
But O365BE is much more than Word and friends. You get professional-grade email hosting with your custom domain name, and again, access to this via the Web. You have a massive one terabyte of online storage through Microsoft’s OneDrive – perfect for storing all your data as well as sharing it with others. This is especially useful for businesses that need to exchange large files, and is completely integrated with the rest of the suite. No more losing your work when your hard drive dies!
One of the best features I enjoy with Office 365 is the online meetings and video conferencing. Microsoft Teams gives you the ability to work effectively with team members next door, or in the next continent. There’s group chat, for your internal business discussions, as well as audio and video calling, just like Skype. In most cases, I’ve replaced traditional phone calls with Teams meetings. The handy OneNote service also in O365BE makes keeping notes for these meetings a breeze – and most importantly enabling me to access them wherever I am.
At the time of writing, the O365BE suite costs $6.40 (Canadian) per user, per month (plus taxes) – assuming you commit for an entire year. You can also pay month-to-month at $7.70 – ideal if you want to pilot Office 365 before committing fully.
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