If you’re like Jenn Schaal, a busy sales manager for an international trade association, your day is filled with client connections, budgets to hit and leads to generate—on top of day-to-day fires to put out. Hitting the end goal—whether it’s a sales target or a client win—takes time and effort. Office 365 helps shave off time throughout the day, so sales managers can meet their goals.
Taking a note from her powerlifting hobby, Jenn wanted to carry over the sense of feeling strong and in charge into her job. She found three ways Office 365 helps her save time, work smarter and be more efficient on the go.
1. Take the hassle out of travel with OneDrive for Business
Travel is almost synonymous with sales, and while it’s invaluable for meeting clients or attending trade events, it can be challenging to stay in sync with reports and presentations being updated back in the office. Jenn knows this all too well. With most of her clients in different markets, she needs to have all the important info in one convenient spot while on the road. With OneDrive for Business, Jenn can pull up files or media kits to share and knows exactly where to find what she needs.
Plus, OneDrive for Business does more than let you view and edit your documents from anywhere. For example:
If your computer happens to die, get lost or is stolen on that important sales trip, you can use someone else’s device and sign in as yourself. Office 365 remembers your most recent documents, so you’ll always have access to client presentations or reports.
Stuck somewhere without internet access but want to get some work done? OneDrive for Business helps you get around your Wi-Fi troubles and work offline by syncing files and folders into your library.
For large ongoing projects, instead of sending specific files, it can be easier to share a whole folder with your client, so that they always have access to the latest reports on OneDrive for Business.
2. Stay on top of what matters with Outlook
Like many people, most of Jenn’s day is spent in Outlook emailing clients, setting up meetings, viewing the team calendar and sending and receiving the latest sales reports. She likes having the same functionality and rich features in the Outlook app, which is especially useful for travel and staying connected on the go.
Power-user tips for smarter emailing and calendaring with Outlook help you get even more done:
Sending a large presentation to a client and don’t want to overflow their inbox? Share as a OneDrive cloud attachment and not only free up space, but make last-minute tweaks without having to re-send the file.
Use Outlook Customer Manager to track customers and see all related info—email, meetings, calls, notes, files, tasks, deals and deadlines—in a convenient focused list view. Deals and even customers can be prioritized and then easily shared with other team members.
3. Stay in touch with your team or clients with Skype for Business
Whether you have a few remote team members, like Jenn, or multiple sales offices across the country, staying connected and aligned on business priorities is key. With Skype for Business, Jenn can easily turn a messaging chat into a call to quickly resolve a problem or close a deal.
There are other ways that Skype can help bridge the distance between teams or clients:
Want to have a call with a client not on Skype for Business? No problem! Meet with up to 250 people—all they need is a phone or internet connection to get started.
Don’t just talk, have a truly interactive meeting by sharing your screen and annotating PowerPoint for real-time collaboration. Then share it all with anyone who couldn’t make it via a recording. You can also use a whiteboard, polls, Q&A and built-in IM during your sales meetings for instant feedback.
Help build connections and relationships with remote clients through video calls. Enjoy industry-leading HD video for online meetings that feel top quality and trustworthy. Focus more on the people in your call, with added features like automatic cropping and head tracking.
Whether it’s storing, syncing and sharing files in OneDrive for Business; smarter emailing or calendaring with the Outlook app; or audio, HD video and web conferencing with Skype for Business; there are many reasons to become a champion for the latest productivity technology within your team or company.
New Yammer features help users more easily connect and collaborate
New capabilities for Yammer announced on Tuesday will make it easier for employees to connect and engage across organizations.
The changes, announced during Microsoft’s SharePoint Virtual Summit, include the ability to enrich new SharePoint communication sites, coming this summer, with a conversational layer by bringing Yammer and SharePoint together. The integration will be further enhanced over the coming months with additional improvements.
Users can now share and play videos from Office 365 Video and Microsoft Stream directly within their Yammer conversations. They can also use Office 365 Connectors to bring relevant content and updates from more than 90 popular third-party apps and services into Yammer conversations.
Yammer groups can now be more easily managed through dynamic group membership that updates automatically as people join, leave or move within organizations. And since staying connected requires versatile tools, Microsoft announced new Yammer apps for iPad, Windows and Mac.
Watch the video to learn more:
3 techniques for successful cloud collaboration
What’s your business’s motivation for implementing cloud collaboration solutions? The ones we hear most frequently are increased productivity, accelerated decision-making and improved sales. But here’s the surprise: According to the 2016 Connected Enterprise Report, one in four IT groups aren’t measuring cloud collaboration results by whether business goals were achieved. They’re not even checking whether users adopted the solution. They’re just measuring whether the tool was implemented.
But implementation isn’t a useful measure of success. Sure, it’s the prerequisite for effective collaboration, but it’s just the first step. Your enterprise can only see a full return on its investment in collaboration technologies when employees actually use the tools—so user adoption is the first measure to focus on.
Putting resources into ensuring adoption pays off. The same report shows that when businesses fully implemented and adopted collaboration technologies, they reported some exciting benefits:
Accelerated decision-making—85 percent say that using collaboration technology has met or exceeded their expectations.
More efficient business processes—79 percent say collaboration has met or exceeded their expectations.
Improved customer service—86 percent say collaboration has met or exceeded their expectations.
Three techniques to increase adoption
Want comparable benefits for your enterprise? Here are three techniques our customers have used to increase adoption of collaboration tools and get great business results. Each company’s story is a little different, but they’ve all improved productivity and agility.
Start with a familiar interface—For fashion group BCBGMAXAZRIAGROUP (BCBG), successful adoption was simpler because they started with a familiar interface.
After evaluating Google Apps and Microsoft Office 365, the IT team at BCBG was concerned that the unfamiliar Google interface would create a training and adoption challenge. “We needed something our employees could adopt now with minimum disruption to day-to-day business,” says Kent Fuller, director of IT Infrastructure Services at BCBG. “We have a lot of infrastructure transformation going on, and Google would have introduced new challenges.” With a familiar interface and credits for online training materials included with subscriptions, BCBG employees can easily adopt Office 365.
One of the main benefits has been productive collaboration. With an updated, advanced messaging and productivity environment, BCBG employees can send and receive email messages faster; have the right tools to produce better documents, spreadsheets and presentations; and collaborate more effectively with colleagues, customers, suppliers and other partners. “With Office 365, we can build a more effective, more comprehensive collaboration environment than we could have with Google Apps,” says Fuller.
Turn executives into enthusiasts—For the KCOM Group, a national communications and information services organization in the United Kingdom, the rollout of its collaboration solution started at the top.
The company originally chose 40 senior executives to evaluate the Office Communications Server 2007 instant messaging, but the number of early users expanded organically and rapidly. “The technology sells itself once you start to use it,” says Dean Branton, group CIO at the KCOM Group and director of customer operations. “The senior team members immediately decided they wanted their direct reports using it as well, and then their extended teams, and then their personal assistants. Before we knew it, we had rolled out by stealth.”
“Now,” says Bill Halbert, executive chairman of the KCOM Group, “We are more flexible, more agile, and we can make quicker decisions, because it is much easier to find the information we need.”
Let the experts help build your plan—The process of building an Office 365 adoption was a little different for Mott MacDonald, a global consulting company. The Microsoft FastTrack Team helped the company with its adoption plan by providing both self-service resources and expert advice. “The FastTrack adoption methodology is really beneficial,” says Simon Denton, the business architect responsible for Office 365 implementation at Mott MacDonald. “It sets out quite clearly the steps we needed to go through to define principles and scenarios. Once we did that, we knew adoption would come easily. We based our entire adoption plan on the FastTrack documentation. It gave us a really good foundation.”
For example, Mott MacDonald encouraged adoption of its new Yammer enterprise social network with a “30 Days of Yammer” campaign, which involved all the staff and more than doubled the number of active and engaged users. Employees started using it to break down barriers within the organization much more quickly than anyone had expected.
The most important step: Start!
As soon as you roll out your collaboration solution, start measuring and tracking user adoption, and move decisively to address any hitches in the process. Implementing a suite solution and preparing your IT team to get employees up and running can be a daunting task—but Office 365 lets you move at your own pace. With our suite of available tools, you decide whether to migrate employees over in groups or by program. The ability to implement a steady rollout enables your teams to work at their own pace, allows you to save costs, and increases productivity by helping your business adapt to new streamlined solutions over time. Additionally, FastTrack for Office 365 provides customers with hands-on support to drive deployment and adoption at their own speed.
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Introducing free Skype Meetings
We’re pleased to introduce free Skype Meetings—a new online meetings tool that provides small businesses with real-time audio and HD video conferencing. Skype Meetings includes collaboration features like the ability to share screens and content during meetings.
Watch this video to see Skype Meetings in action:
With Skype Meetings, you can quickly set up meetings and share a personalized URL that participants click to join the meeting. During the meeting, participants can IM, share their screen or PowerPoint presentation or use the laser pointer and whiteboard features to make it more engaging and productive. The meeting organizer also gets professional meeting controls such as the ability to mute the audience in order to be heard.
Anyone in the U.S. with a business email address and whose organization doesn’t already have Office 365 can sign up for free Skype Meetings at www.skype.com/meetings. Once you sign up, you can set up meetings for up to 10 people for the first 60 days and up to 3 people thereafter. All you need is a device with an Internet browser, a microphone, speaker and camera, which are included on many devices.
If you have an Office 365 business subscription that includes Skype for Business, then you already have richer online meetings capabilities, such as the ability to conduct large group meetings for up to 250 people and the ability to IM anyone in your organization at any time—not just during meetings. In addition, Skype for Business is integrated with other Office 365 apps to enable you to do things like schedule a Skype meeting from your Outlook calendar, see your colleagues’ presence, and initiate an IM or start an audio or video conversation within apps like Outlook, Word and PowerPoint.
