The go-to features your business should be using with Office 365

Microsoft has long dominated the business world, and Office 365 has fast become their most popular subscription package.   The majority of our clients use Office 365 daily, but we’re finding most are not utilising all the features that the package has to offer.  This is why we’ve listed our top four Apps that are included included in Office 356 that our team believe add real value to businesses.

1. Microsoft To-Do

If staying organised and having tools to help manage your weekly tasks is important, Microsoft To-Do is a must in any organisation. To-Do is designed for both managing everyday tasks as well as the more complex and time consuming activities, so can be used either as a basic to-co list or a project planning tool.  You can share your lists with others, outline deadlines clearly and choose what tasks you want to prioritise on what dates. It also integrates with Outlook and can be configured so that any email you flag automatically goes in to your tasks list. The mobile apps are great too, so you can always have quick access to your daily and weekly tasks.

2. Microsoft Bookings

Microsoft Booking allows users to schedule and manage appointments online and simplify the process of arranging a meeting with people. The app is synced with your Outlook calendar and is integrated on mobile devices giving users a flexible alternative to phone-scheduling and making accidental double bookings! Microsoft Bookings lets users set automatic reminders to be sent to clients and staff and you can provide people with a link allowing them to find availabile appointments where you’re both free and book quickly and easily.  Google has had this feature for ages and it’s great to see it come to Microsoft.

3. Microsoft Flow

Microsoft Flow allows users to automate actions based on common scenarios.  For example, you can set a Flow so that every time you receive an order confirmation email from a supplier, the details are automatically added to a spreadsheet that keeps track of your orders.    We use Flow to automatically grab information from certain websites and update documents for us, saving someone doing it manually.   Flow links apps in Office 365 and other online services, ultimately saving manual effort.  It’s one of the more techy apps within Office 365 but it’s designed to be very user friendly and doesn’t need tech knowledge to make things work.  There are lots of Flow templates that you can use too.

4. Microsoft Teams

A firm favourite at Systemagic HQ, the chat based solution allows businesses to embrace instant messaging, voice and video calls (Teams is replacing Skype for Business), group chat, share files within a team and work on documents all from a single application. We love Teams because it keeps our entire team in constant communication regardless of where they are or what device they’re working on.   If you’ve ever used or looked at Slack – Teams is pretty much the same but bigger.  In fact Teams has become Microsoft’s fastest growing application ever.