Office 365 benefits for small businesses

Ask any Chief Technology Officer these days about their company’s current IT strategies and the answer will almost certainly include the word “cloud”.

We’ve certainly come a long way since the late 90s when Larry Ellison, head of Oracle Corporation, tried to persuade the market to buy into thin computing. The idea was to have a diskless computer (known as a network computer) that connected to a server or to the cloud.

The project didn’t take off. Laptops were becoming popular and users didn’t like the idea of not being able to carry their files and programs around with them.

But fast forward to 2017 and attitudes have finally shifted. Most of us are still not using diskless computers, but the advantage of storing data and working in the cloud has become an accepted reality, with Office 365 now one of the most popular cloud-based applications.

6 small business benefits of Office 365

Remember when Microsoft Office required one licence per computer? Or when you would send a Word doc or Excel file to another person who couldn’t open your version without converting it to an updated format?

Today, Office 365 creates greater flexibility and a more seamless and cost effective experience for a variety of reasons:

1)   Work anywhere

Working offsite can sometimes mean losing access to your files on the company server back in the office. But the tools within Office 365, including OneDrive online storage or SharePoint, ensure you can store files, share docs and collaborate on docs with colleagues who are also on the road.

2)   Better licensing

With Office 365, it’s easy to manage user licences across your entire organisation from one central point. You’ll no longer need to install licences along with disks on each machine manually.

3)   More email space

With older versions of Office, and specifically Outlook within it, your storage space was limited to your computer’s hard drive, or to the server on which you hosted your emails. Because Office 365 is in the cloud, and Microsoft is (presumably) never going to run out of storage space, there’s theoretically no limit to how large your mailbox can get. If you pay enough, of course.

4)   Easier budgeting

The cost of upgrading individual licences used to be prohibitive for most companies to stay up to date. You can predict your monthly subscription to Office 365 based on how many people you have in your organisation and the permissions you give them.

5)   Organise your life

Because Microsoft now develops Office products in the cloud, the cost of development has fallen and that means it is able to focus on better cross-app integration and interaction. Within Office 365, you can easily access stored files, shared docs, chats, business intelligence and many other things.

6)   Always on, always safer

Hosting your office platform in the cloud means you rely on Microsoft’s more powerful data security protection and reliable uptime guarantee. Your machine may crash, but you can always log in and do stuff from another device.