5 Ways to Build Small-Business Efficiency with Microsoft 365

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Business productivity needs to be more than a buzzphrase today. Without technology supporting communications and process productivity, remaining competitive is difficult. You’ll lack the agility and mobility needed to succeed. This article explores many ways a small business gains efficiency using Microsoft 365.

You may already be aware of the core functionalities of Microsoft 365. These include:

  • a business email address and shared calendaring services;
  • online storage offering a shared space for collaboration and large personal storage space for each user account;
  • productivity apps to collaborate on documents, spreadsheets, and presentations;
  • communication tools, including messaging and video conferencing;
  • security features, including two-factor authentication.

Having all these features in one solution is helpful. Not having to switch between different vendors’ apps can help your business:

  • save time;
  • simplify deployment;
  • cut tech support and IT management challenges;
  • budget consistently with one invoice for one solution.
  • Yet there are still more ways Microsoft 365 helps run a small business more efficiently.

#1 Automate Processes

Powered by machine learning and artificial intelligence (AI), Microsoft 365 allows everyone to automate work processes. The solution allows users to quickly and securely automate the mundane and repetitive. All it takes is using low-code, drag-and-drop tools, or prebuilt connectors.

Processing forms with automation can be a real time-saver. For example, you might use Power Automate to detect text in PDFs, which would then cue certain actions. A business spending hours scanning paper to digital could save a lot of effort this way.

#2 Enable Online Booking

Another tool to help save time, Microsoft Bookings promises “a simpler way to organize schedules and manage appointments.” A hair salon, financial services office, or home services business could all benefit. Bookings integrate appointment settings with Microsoft 365 or Office 365 calendars.

Customers appreciate the ease of finding available time slots, and you avoid double-booking. You can also specify information needed upfront or assign certain staff to different bookings.

#3 Streamline Chat

Everyone is accessible with Microsoft Teams. The software allows users to chat, call, or jump on video calls, all from one place. Teams also keep documents, chat history, and meeting notes in one place.

With the Microsoft Teams instant messenger program it’s easier to:

  • keep people focused;
  • reduce email clutter;
  • make decisions faster;
  • communicate and collaborate wherever you are.

The Teams Chat option also helps bring people together, even if they’re working remotely. GIFs, stickers, and emojis can help share personalities.

#4 Use Online Whiteboard

Touted as a “collaborative digital canvas,” Microsoft 365’s Whiteboard helps small businesses collaborate and brainstorm, wherever people work.

You might enjoy:

  • using a digital pen or text objects to add content;
  • adding sticky notes to convey ideas and provide feedback;
  • selecting and moving objects to organize tasks or ideas on the whiteboard;
  • highlighting and annotating;
  • creating diagrams and process flows with shapes, lines, and text;
  • uploading images to improve engagement.

#5 Amp up Data Analytics

Any small business can grow more data-driven with Power BI. The Business Intelligence tool enables business owners to find and share meaningful insights. Hundreds of data visualizations, built-in AI capabilities, and prebuilt and custom connectors reduce analytical complexity. The Excel integration makes reporting smoother, too.

Making the Most of Microsoft 365

You can choose a cloud-based Microsoft 365 plan, or download and install the software on up to 15 devices per user… or both! You’ll soon see the benefits of doing your small business with the support of Microsoft 365.

Need help deciding if Microsoft 365 is right for you? Or want to learn how to use its features more efficiently? Our IT experts are available to answer your questions. Contact us today at (515)422-1995.

Microsoft 365 Streamlines Business and Reduces Spend

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When doing business online, you have many options for available software and systems. You might turn to one solution to handle online meetings, another to drive collaboration, and yet another to manage your content and workflow. It can get confusing. Plus, when you are duplicating tools, IT spend can mushroom unnecessarily. Microsoft 365 aims to offer a single, all-in-one solution. This article highlights the benefits of streamlining your software needs.

Formerly Office 365, Microsoft 365 is for home, business, enterprise, and education users. Microsoft touts that the software helps businesses reimagine the way they work.

Consolidating many business apps can encourage productivity, support collaboration, and cut costs. Doing away with the fragmentation of many different vendor apps your business can:

  • save time;
  • manage projects, communications, calendars, and more in a unified platform;
  • simplify deployment;
  • cut tech support and IT management challenges;
  • budget better with one invoice for the one solution.

Microsoft 365 Replaces Your Many Apps

There are many online business tools you can replace with Microsoft 365.

Communication

First, there’s Business Voice to replace your traditional phone systems. This secure and cost-effective VoIP service enables users to make and receive calls from any device. You can use a laptop, mobile, or desktop, while continuing to use the same number as the desk phone. You can dial in numbers for call conferencing, AI voicemail, transcription, and real-time captioning help, too.

Microsoft 365 also lets users pop into meetings immediately within their Teams channels. They can easily start a phone or video meeting, and during the meeting, they can also share files and PowerPoints. Plus, integrating Outlook contacts and calendars helps efficiency and scheduling.

Collaboration

Microsoft users are already relying on Word, Excel, and PowerPoint files. With Microsoft 365, these files are easy to use and share online. Collaborate in a shared document, in real-time, with version control.

Within Microsoft Teams, users have a whiteboard and screen, too. Custom backgrounds and the Together mode are particularly useful during the pandemic. Blur the background on a video call or choose a custom setting. Or sit in a shared digital background to feel as if you’re all actually in the same space together again.

This can replace GoToMeeting, Zoom, and WebEx, as well as document management software, Box, or an on-premises file server.

Apps and Services

Integrate bots, automate workflows, or manage data with more than 700 productivity, project management, industry-specific, or business department apps.

Businesses can connect data to improve agility with Power automate doing repetitive tasks. Power BI makes it easier to discuss and visualize data.

Emails and Planning

Microsoft Exchange does away with on-premises email, Web hosting provider email, or Gmail. Plus, people can stay better organized with integrated notes, documents, and calendars.

Instead of tracking things in Trello, Basecamp, or another project platform, use Planner to stay on top of progress.

Backup storage

Your Microsoft 365 subscription includes 1 terabyte of OneDrive cloud storage. That’s equivalent to 6.5 million document pages (such as Office files, PDFs, and presentations). Plus, your workers can share, locate, and collaborate in SharePoint.

Cybersecurity

Microsoft 365 also offers secure messaging and multi-factor authentication. The “1,000+ security and privacy controls” help meet industry and regulatory standards. That’s without needing Proofpoint, Mimecast, or Barracuda, or other advanced threat protections.

Simplify your IT infrastructure with Microsoft 365. Reduce software duplication, cut back on software licensing costs, and regain storage capacity.

Find out more about this secure, current, unified platform solution. Microsoft 365 can benefit your business. Our IT experts can answer your questions. We’ll help you make the most of your Microsoft subscription. Contact us today at (515)422-1995.

Doing Business in Microsoft 365? Backup Your Data

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Many business tools are moving to the cloud. One popular option is Microsoft 365, formerly known as Office 365. This unified platform consolidates Excel, Word, and PowerPoint with collaboration and communication tools. Added apps and services help streamline operations, too. Simplifying your IT infrastructure can also cut costs and reduce duplication of effort. Still, when you’re leveraging the convenience of Microsoft 365, data backup is your job.

When all software was on-site on business servers and machines, you had complete control. The IT team kept the systems up to date, virus-free, and running smoothly. They built in redundancy to ensure data recovery. They planned for natural disaster, human error, malicious attack, ransomware, or hardware misconfiguration.

Now, though, IT doesn’t have the same control. With the transition to Microsoft 365, the job has changed. Microsoft makes sure its users can continue to access SharePoint or Teams in the event of a disaster, but this doesn’t mean they are responsible for backing up your data – that’s your responsibility.

As do many cloud-based vendors, the company says you own and control your data. They ensure service availability, but you need to set up your own data backup in case of a hack, employee error, or failing to install a security patch.

What does Microsoft 365 Backup?

Reducing downtime is a big reason to backup data. Resilience in the wake of a data breach helps establish credibility with customers, investors, and employees. You may also need backups for compliance with legal guidelines and industry standards.

Yes, you can restore some data within Microsoft 365, but only in the short term. For instance, you can recover information from your deleted-items folder. When something is deleted from that folder, an administrator can often recover it from a system-wide recycling bin.

The thing is, Microsoft 365 doesn’t hold data for that long. It can range from two weeks to a month, depending on your configuration. Plus, you’re not in control of when data is purged, from which there is no recovery.

Microsoft’s datacenter redundancy and data replication efforts support service uptime. It won’t matter if your data is breached, encrypted, or irretrievable due to a hardware failure, flood, or fire.

You need your own data backup. We recommend that you have “snapshots” of your data in three places: one is on-site on a local, protected computer or device; another would be on a remote device; and the third would be in the cloud with a reputable third-party backup provider.

Test Your Backup

Having a backup of Microsoft 365 data offers reassurance that your business can bounce back. Still, don’t get complacent just yet. Along with having a process in place to back up your data, also plan on testing backups.

Testing helps you learn how effectively you can recover following data loss. Plus, testing backups saves you from finding out in a crisis that something has been wrong all along.

Protect your business from data loss and lengthy downtime with your own data backup. We can offer you backup services and help get your company up and running again if the worst does happen. Contact us at (515)422-1995 for help today!

Increase Productivity with Microsoft Power Automate

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Productivity is the great goal of business. If you’re a Microsoft 365 user, you have access to a tool that can easily increase your process efficiency. Here’s what you need to know about Microsoft’s Power Automate.

Power Automate is a cloud-based product available to Windows 10 users. The tool, formerly known as Microsoft Flows, brings intelligent automation to business processes. Harness the benefits of artificial intelligence developing workflows and creating data dashboards.

Power Automate hands over mundane tasks and manual processes to robotic process automation (RPA). With RPA you can:

  • understand bottlenecks;
  • map and analyze processes;
  • identify time savings opportunities;
  • capture institutional knowledge;
  • track important metrics;
  • make data-driven decisions;
  • empower users to share processes and collaborate;
  • break down internal business silos moving data between departmental systems on a schedule.

Power Automate is available online, as a desktop client, or as a mobile application, and for both iOS and Android devices. Best of all, it’s included in your Microsoft cost.

How Does Power Automate Work?

In Power Automate you build time-saving workflows using a low-code or no-code experience. The software offers templates or step-by-step guidance to help create automated workflows.

The secure and scalable technology connects with other Microsoft products, of course. It can also link new and legacy systems and allows users to integrate or create their own connectors.

You might set up a notification in Teams when a new Microsoft Forms response comes in, or when a Microsoft Planner task updates, or configure workflows to move documents between different SharePoint folders, or hand over Excel calculations to the AI.

Don’t trust RPA to do the work on its own? You can set up attended or unattended workflows. Attended workflows need humans to start the task or provide Yes or No feedback at workflow sequence stages.

You might use unattended for boring, time-consuming tasks. Think of the time saved in accounting with Power Automate:

  • printing an invoice hard copy;
  • creating a new Outlook task to follow up on that invoice in 30 days;
  • forwarding the submitted invoice to the next person in the operations chain.

Is Power Automate for Us?

RPA can help any business save time and reduce operating costs. Plus, Power Automate doesn’t work solely in the Microsoft environment. You might connect a Customer Relationship Management tool. Then, you could automate appointment scheduling and trigger file sending from One Drive.

The uses of RPA abound across industries. You might use Power Automate to:

  • process forms;
  • extract information;
  • perform sentiment analysis;
  • read business cards;
  • classify files;
  • track mailboxes;
  • orchestrate your pipeline;
  • automate auditing;
  • manage inventory levels.

Create workflows using templates or design your own with what Microsoft touts as “point-and-click simplicity.” Don’t find it that simple? We can do it for you.

Streamline repetitive tasks and operational processes with Power Automate. Turn your attention instead to areas that grow business and boost innovation. Need assistance setting up the workflows in Power Automate? Our IT experts can help. Contact us today at (515)422-1995!

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