A classic office application suite, Office 365 is accessible from various devices and offers all the well-known Microsoft applications, as well as new, dynamic features connected to the cloud that let you collaborate, communicate, and increase productivity. The following practical Office 365 features are particularly useful for service companies:
Bookings
Bookings is a very useful and practical online mobile application for small and medium-sized businesses that provide services to their customers on an appointment-making basis, such as veterinarians, dental offices, beauty salons, hairdressers, law firms, financial services providers, consultants, or car repair shops. It lets customers plan and manage their appointments themselves.
StaffHub
A cloud-based application, StaffHub lets employees and managers use their mobile devices to manage schedules and stay in touch. For example, employees can use StaffHub to request days off, switch shifts, and communicate with their colleagues. They can also send messages directly to each other or to the whole team, while managers can use it to send messages, create schedules, and send news or company announcements to the team.
Yammer
A real corporate social network, Yammer lets you stay connected by creating groups related to each job and participate in each activity. It also lets you get answers to your questions, even when you don’t know who to turn to; collaborate in total security with subcontractors, customers, or subsidiaries; and keep documents, photos, and videos visible to everyone by adding them to conversations.
Skype for Business
An instant messaging system, Skype for Business is tailored to companies and makes it possible to communicate by voice command, chat, or video, for internal or external communication. Its “business” orientation can be found in the integration of Outlook with the Skype software, which makes it possible to plan meetings online and send personalized links in order to know the participation. This feature, which has good audio and video quality, can accommodate up to 250 video conference participants.
Planner
Planner is an application centred around teamwork and managing tasks in groups. Among other things, it lets you assign missions, share them, and track their progress.
To-Do
To-Do is a personal agenda and task management tool that, unlike Planner (which is focused on teamwork), is designed for individual use. To-Do includes a self-learning engine that allows it to make suggestions for tasks to be carried out based on the day of the week.
Office Lens
Office Lens is an innovative and useful Microsoft feature for SMEs that provides services, and especially for people who work remotely. In effect, Lens lets you turn any smartphone or tablet into a scanner, which in turn lets you take a picture of a document, then convert it, through character recognition, to Word, PowerPoint, or PDF format so that you can share it quickly with colleagues.
With Office 365, the flexibility of the cloud lets files from small and medium-sized service companies not stay blocked on a single computer, but be accessible wherever you want: at home or on a laptop – anywhere. You can therefore share and synchronize documents anywhere and any time with your employees and have conversations and video conferences with them.
