The top three business objectives for any leading company are to; increase productivity, improve collaboration and enable innovation. Microsoft Office 365 is an integrated cloud platform that delivers industry-leading productivity applications such as Word, Excel, PowerPoint and Teams. In addition, it also offers intelligent cloud services along with outstanding security, a necessity today.

Through its various applications, Office 365 allows companies to gain specific insights and harness essential organisational knowledge that increases their efficiency. This shared workspace also integrates with many of its other proprietary solutions and third-party apps in a secure environment, allowing employees to work faster and smarter. Office 365 has the added benefit of improving compliance, manageability and system performance.

The COVID-19 lockdown has increased the adoption and use of MS Teams which allows employees to focus on their core work through more accessible access to information and sharing thereof. This, in turn, fosters innovation which results in a quicker turn-around time and the reduction of operating costs. Office 365 is a highly collaborative online platform that quickly allows employees to share information, coordinate their projects and adhere to best business practices.

Improved Communication

Online meetings conducted using Teams provides members with high-quality video and audio, which can be recorded and transcribed. Teams meetings are quick and straightforward to set up and have resulted in employees gaining more out of each session as well as having to spend less time in unnecessary meetings. Costs relating to video conferencing, mobile phones and long-distance calls are curtailed, resulting in significant savings over time.

Improved Collaboration

Surveys conducted by Microsoft indicate that Teams saves employees, especially those working from home, about 45 minutes per week in collaboration with colleagues because it is easier to find and share resources. IT Technicians also indicated that they saved up to four hours a week due to improved online collaboration and found managing downtime much easier. Executives were also enabled to make more informed and quicker decisions as they had the necessary resources immediately available to them and were able to share documents more efficiently with their colleagues.

While some effort is initially required to migrate from Skype Business to MS Teams, once implemented, the focus of an Office 365 deployment for businesses will shift to change management and training employees to use the system.

In instances where companies do not have a dedicated IT department, the implementation and management of this cloud-based workspace, as well as any other managed services required, can be outsourced to a professional IT company such as Westech.

Westech is a highly experienced IT Support Company that has been servicing all major business sectors across South Africa since 1994. The company also provides outsourced online IT support for countries outside of South Africa.

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