What Makes an Ideal Office 365 Intranet?
Office 365 has benefitted a huge number of businesses by offering top-of-the-line productivity tools and applications that can be accessed anytime, from anywhere. For enterprises who are currently on an Office 365 subscription plan offered by Microsoft, utilizing the comprehensive range of its tools is a no brainer. It can help them overcome communication challenges and promote knowledge sharing, collaboration, productivity and employee efficiency; thus taking their business to a different productivity level in a short time.
However, Office 365 is equipped with a lot of tools and Microsoft continues to add to the list. Some of the tools have overlapping functionality and users could get overwhelmed if they aren’t given clear directions for their use.
If you are considering Office 365 intranet solution, then here is a list of a few applications and tools that can help you make the most of your investment.
SharePoint Online
SharePoint Online makes collaboration with colleagues, customers and partners hassle-free. It provides you access to documents, business data, internal sites and other crucial information, irrespective of time and place.
With SharePoint Online being a cloud offering managed by Microsoft, you can do away with IT costs and maintenance headaches. All improvements, upgrades, installation of patches and data backups will be taken care of.
Team sites is a very prominent feature of SharePoint Online so let us take a look at it briefly.
Team Site – SharePoint’s Team Site collates and connects your team with the content, apps and information on which you rely for accomplishing day to day tasks. With Team Sites, you can create multiple business sites to satisfy the different business needs and requirements of each team, and the best part is that it requires no IT expertise to do so. You can add documents, videos, images and site activities to your Team site with just a few clicks.
OneDrive for Business
OneDrive is used for synchronizing files across devices so as to encourage communication and collaboration within an enterprise. It is an easy to access repository of files that is backed by state-of-the-art administration, control and security features.
OneDrive offers employees the flexibility to access the content from any device, irrespective of the place. Some of its basic authoring features are browser enabled, which supports real-time co-authoring from mobile phone, laptop or other devices. Coworkers can securely share files and documents for streamlining communication and driving innovation.
Yammer
It is an Enterprise Social Networking tool that gives your team a faster and smarter way to collaborate, share information and data across the company. Yammer lets communications between users flow irrespective of where they are physically – in the office, at home or on-the-go. It has been observed that the global market for Enterprise Social Networks will reach US$4.8 billion by 2023, making Yammer an essential tool within Office 365.
Groups/ Teams
These are the two applications offered by Office 365 that lay emphasis on group collaboration and communication. Groups provides seamless file sharing across various teams while also integrating with Yammer to provide social capability. Teams is a chat-based workspace that aims to bind all the employees together and helps them interact cohesively and meaningfully.
Delve
Delve is an intuitive application that allows smarter searching within the intranet. It makes use of the Office Graph to monitor user interactions. It tracks what users do on the intranet – what documents/articles they view, which users they communicate with, what projects they work on, etc. Then it consolidates all this information and uses it to pull up more relevant and useful content when a user conducts a search, thereby reducing the time it takes to find pertinent and useful information.
In an era where organizations are producing volumes of data every day, it has become a priority to safe-guard and organize the data on a reliable platform. An Office 365 intranet helps meet your organization’s needs for robust security, reliability, and user productivity. Because security is significant for business success, Microsoft has policies, controls, and systems built into Office 365 to help keep your information safe.
An Office 365 intranet lets you organize, connect and manage all parts of your business in one place. Considering the benefits of Office 365 intranet platforms, one should seek to invest in it. This not only saves time and efforts but also creates a better working environment within an organization.
So, use the Office 365 tools outlined in this article and when you feel comfortable you can explore other tools like Skype, Power BI and Power Apps too.
Shivani Shelke is a well-versed writer who is passionate about writing on a variety of topics such as technology, entrepreneurship, communication, Office 365 intranet and so on.