Article The Software Benefits of Office 365
When it comes to cloud-based productivity software, you have many choices. One of the most common options is Microsoft Office 365.
By Jessica Hall / 25 May 2016 / Topics: Cloud Microsoft 365 Software
By Jessica Hall / 25 May 2016 / Topics: Cloud Microsoft 365 Software
Office 365 provides enterprise-class service and capabilities to help your business run smarter. When looking into Office 365, consider these four important points about software:
Offering a comprehensive suite of productivity tools, Office 365 delivers many of the same software solutions companies used on premises. Now those familiar tools live in the cloud.
“This has some advantages in terms of cost and the capabilities they can offer,” says Bob German, principal architect at BlueMetal, an Insight company.
Microsoft not only allows companies to communicate and collaborate like never before, but it also provides an unrivaled hybrid solution for migrating to the cloud, making it easy to attain these benefits within your organization.
“Microsoft is a business-driven solution,” says Ben O’Dwyer, client director at BlueMetal. Microsoft’s lineage has better positioned the company to address enterprise needs, he explains.
The memory footprint for Excel 2013 and Excel 2016 has shifted. While this change doesn’t affect the vast majority of workloads, it can have a significant impact on companies in the financial services sector, as they have a strong dependency on computationally intensive spreadsheets.
“As companies in financial services have started to upgrade to Office 365, they're finding their spreadsheets are producing out-of-memory errors,” explains Stefanos Daskalakis, project manager at BlueMetal.
To address this problem, BlueMetal developed a migration assessment tool for Office 365. “We run this assessment tool, produce the results, uncover the problematic spreadsheets that consume a lot of memory, and then put a plan in place for the client to remediate those spreadsheets to help them work better in Office 365,” Daskalakis says.
Whether your organization is a business-to-business or business-to-community company, employees likely find themselves working with a variety of other organizations. Secure hooks are needed, and Microsoft provides more control as well as enterprise-grade security solutions. “If you’re both using Office 365, you get Microsoft’s Active Directory, which historically resided on on-premise servers and now resides in the cloud,” O’Dwyer explains. “What that means is it’s very easy to establish a trust, either for permission and rights or a global identity of the user.”
“Gartner currently estimates the cloud office market at around 15% of the total office market and expects its adoption to more than double in the next four years. Increased adoption rates have led IT leaders to develop a position on cloud office systems — they must have a plan to move toward them or have justified reasons for opting out,” according to Gartner’s report, “What to Think of When Considering Office 365 or Google Apps for Work,” published July 17, 2015.
Get started on your cloud office system strategy today. Gartner guides you on what to think about when considering such a move, and we’ve made it available for complementary download: “What to Think of When Considering Office 365 or Google Apps for Work.”
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