Office 365 offers us many tools that allow companies of any size to boost the productivity of their employees. However, there are so many that users often do not know which one to use or simply do not use the most appropriate one for the task they need to carry out.
So, if you are starting with Office 365 or want to know if you use the most appropriate collaboration tool for the tasks you usually carry out … continue reading, this post is for you!
Exchange and Outlook
Exchange and Outlook are Office 365 email applications. Email is a basic tool for any organization, it is built on standards and is a fundamental component of business collaboration for decades.
When to use it?
When the need for response is not immediate or in the case of not obtaining a response in a reasonable time; In this case, you have the possibility of using another means of more immediate communication, such as Skype for business.
There are different ways to prioritize emails that are very effective, such as checking priority states, reading confirmations or through one of the latest news in Outlook 2016, highlighting conversations with @mentions. In any case, you should always bear in mind that email does not make urgent sense and that it is an excellent tool to collaborate at a constant pace.
Business Skype
Business Skype is a concept of collaboration totally different from email since it is designed to promote real-time communications, also offering a complete videoconferencing solution. Business Skype includes messaging, voice, video and online conferences in the same tool that links communication and collaboration through a simple experience for the user.
When to use it?
Enterprise Skype is perfect for situations in which the need for immediate response is important, for example, you can send an instant message to resolve a quick question or make an audio call. Also, the tool allows you to make presentations online with audio, video, desktop sharing and virtual whiteboard.
And if this were not enough, Skype business offers a comprehensive solution for voice and video conferencing with which you can make online events of up to 10 thousand attendees (Skype Meeting Broadcast), manage phone calls with very competitive pricing plans with Microsoft as a provider ( Pstn Calling) and an online switchboard service with which you can manage calls in your company directly from Skype (Cloud PBX).
Yammer
Yammer is the private social network for companies in which a space is created for a fluid and bidirectional communication. It gathers all the characteristics of a social network (conversation, immediacy, feeds, microbloggins, etc …) transferred to the company and designed so that employees can communicate with each other, streamlining the internal communication process with respect to traditional systems such as meetings , email, etc …
When to use it?
It is usually used to share knowledge with colleagues or colleagues, publish news, open debates or ask questions, but without expecting an immediate interaction of conversations since in most cases the answers and participation take hours and days.
SharePoint Online
The tools we have talked about so far are based on conversation, but true collaboration can go much further. SharePoint Online is the content hub of your team. It’s where all the people you work with, both from your organization and external to it, meet in real time to work, create and share content with Office applications and OneDrive for Business.
With SharePoint, you can easily store, synchronize and share documents with users regardless of where they are located or what device they use to access documentation.
Planner
Poorly organized teamwork can be chaotic and to solve this problem Office 365 offers Planner, the tool for organizing teamwork and online collaboration. With Planner, teams can create new projects, organize, assign and collaborate with tasks, chat about the project, set due dates, update states and share files.
Each plan has its own panel, where you can organize tasks in cubes and classify tasks according to the state or user to whom they were assigned.
OneNote
Sharing notes after a meeting was a task that required time to transcribe the notes taken and send them by email to your entire team. Now this whole process is simplified with OneNote, the Office 365 digital notepad that offers you a unique place to collect all your annotations and easily share them in a few clicks.
OneNote is designed to collect, organize and share materials without design , usually for projects, a general tool for taking notes in any situation that saves and automatically synchronizes the notes so you can focus on your thoughts and ideas.
Team collaboration
These tools that we have talked about are the collaboration tools included in Office 365, now we know when to use each of them separately. However, it is likely that for certain projects your work will be much more effective using a combination of them.
Office 365 includes tools that adapt to the way teams work by offering an integrated solution that allows them to collaborate more effectively through chat, online meetings, co-authoring, secure file sharing and group email. Next we talk about them:
Teams
Microsoft Teams is a new workspace based on chat and designed to improve communication and collaboration of work teams of companies. Teams gathers in a common space, the collaboration applications necessary to work as a team (Chats, Videoconferences, notes, access to content, Office Online, planner, among other features).
Teams is designed for a need for instant interaction; You initiate a conversation with your team of Teams normally waiting for an immediate response to effectively advance in the project. One of its differentiating capabilities is that the tool offers us the possibility of tracking conversations through the chat history.
Office 365 groups
The differences between Teams and Groups of Office 365 are less evident since the two tools share a large part of the infrastructure. In fact, you can create a team of Teams from an existing Office 365 group.
It works with Office 365 applications, so users can co-author files, store files in the group’s document library, take notes with OneNote, organize and assign tasks through Planner, schedule meetings or send emails within the group.
One of the differences is that Teams focuses its entire platform on the agility of the chat while using Groups will be Outlook its usual interface for conversations and shared resources.
Now that you know all the tools that Office 365 offers to collaborate and make your company and your teams more productive , what are you waiting to use it?
Do you want to know more about the collaboration tools and the rest of the applications that make up the Office 365 suite?