Office 365 – what can it do for me?

Office 365 – what can it do for me?

That was the title of the presentation I gave at Office* 2015 last Wednesday at Olympia. As I was talking about Office 365 I thought it was fitting to add a blog about it to the PowerTips 365 category.

I was approached a couple of months ago to step in and deliver a session at Office* 2015 as one of their presenters could not attend. Of course I said YES! I chose to speak on Office 365 as it is so topical at the moment and we are getting increasing numbers of enquiries about training it in to organisations.

Typically, an organisation will make the decision to go down the Office 365 route without thinking about the effect it will have on the day to day work of the people that work there. As the familiar packages, Word, Excel, PowerPoint, Outlook etc are included management often think that the people using Office will just be able to carry on as normal.

If the organisation is migrating to a cloud storage solution as well as the use of the packages, then this assumption does not necessary hold true. The main issues people have with the transition, is not knowing how to use the online functionality and not understanding the difference between OneDrive for Business and SharePoint or when to use them. Each of these has a different function.

At Office*2015 I spoke about what is included in Office 365 and went on to present a live demonstration of some of the online functionality. Showing people how to save and upload documents and how to use some of the new functionality in Outlook on the Web, was a real boon.

Office 365 can help your business or organisation become more efficient, and save money. As you no longer need an on premise server due to the cloud storage capability, the need for an expensive server and a support contract are negated. Some technical support is useful though – getting everything set up properly, making sure that people have the correct permissions, and setting up the SharePoint Sites you need will benefit from someone who knows what they are doing.

Here is a Sway that I created from the slides I used at the show. Sway is part of Office 365 and lives online. It is an online presentation tool – you can use it to build tutorials, give information or create an online newsletter. I imported my slides into Sway and then did a bit of editing and hey presto! You can watch it online.

Here is what one participant in the session said afterward.

I am looking forward to “getting to grips with Office 365” and encouraging my colleagues to do the same .. we have had it for a while, but it is not being used properly .. and from the seminars I attended on Wednesday .. it really is a case of .. we only use 13% of a package, as we haven’t been trained properly on using these packages, and it would increase productivity if we all had the same training and actually knew what we were getting from these packages right from the start.

To talk to us about helping your people get to grips with Office 365 and get stuff done, give us a call on 020 8203 1774 – we are looking forward to helping you make the most of this awesome package.

If you would like to engage Shelley to speak at your event – give us a call on 0209 8203 1774.