3 Killer Ways to Extend Office 365 Beyond Mail

Most everyone is aware of the Pareto Principle – better known as the 80/20 rule – where 80% of the effects come from 20% of the cause. This rule has also been adapted for the software industry where it’s commonly held that 80% of users use only 20% of a software application’s features. If your organization views Microsoft Office 365 as simply a mail application, you may be suffering the same fate.

Here are three killer extensions to help you take full advantage of your Office 365 implementation.

1. One Drive

It’s been estimated that data is growing at the rate of 500% year over year. Despite the fact that the cost of storage has plummeted, there is simply not enough room to store that massive amount of data on premises. To solve the problem, more individuals and organizations are looking to the Cloud where the file sharing and synching market is expected to reach $100 billion by 2017. One Drive is Office 365’s cloud solution to the data storage dilemma.

Many individuals and organizations are using solutions such as Dropbox, Google Drive, or Boxer, but in many ways One Drive meets or exceeds the capabilities of those products. One Drive for Business is available and accessed through the interface of Office or Cloud Resources and provides 1 TB of storage data. It’s easily sharable through your Office client integration and your team can collaborate via co-authoring privileges. Security has been enhanced as Microsoft recently announced that all data in Office 365 data centers is now encrypted at rest as well as during transmission.  

2. Power BI

Collecting and storing data is a first step, but the ultimate goal is to turn that data into valuable information. Office 365 can help with that as well with Power BI.  This business intelligence tool enhances what you can do with Excel and by setting up sites within your SharePoint environment. Power BI helps gather, consolidate, and condense data so your team can make reasoned business decisions. 

Through Excel, you can create and customize rich, interactive dashboards and reports to monitor your key data from any database whether or not it resides in Microsoft. You can search and combine public and internal data with Power Query, model and analyze hundreds of millions of rows quickly with Power Pivot, and explore and visualize data in new ways with Power View and Power Map. You can then use the output to target the right opportunities and better service your customers.

Using SharePoint, you can publish data, reports, and insights for easy access from anywhere. You’re able to refresh the source data to ensure that the information is always up to date, and you can control who has access to what data while monitoring storage.

3. Lync

Chances are the results you come up with from you data analysis will likely need to be shared with others in the organization.  More and more business are doing this through virtual online meetings. Lync Online is Office 365’s resident cloud-based application in this space. It’s available for all platforms and devices and makes it simple to set up or join meetings regardless of your location. You can connect with HD video conferencing to reduce travel time and costs, view presenter’s shared screen or slides, conduct polling and Q&A, and connect with real-time white boarding.

Lync Online comes as part of the Office 365 subscription and no additional setup is required. It’s part of the managed infrastructure so updates are transparent, and is one of the simplest things in Office 365 to administer. Some of the newer features include high-resolution video, modern and web clients, social and integrated design, and federation with Skype.

Office 365 is a robust platform that can be made even more powerful thanks to tools that are either resident with the software or ones that can be easily added. Taking advantage of them allows you to fully utilize its capabilities and can help transform your business.

Click here to view the online presentation of Office 365 Migration Path – Beyond Mail.