5 Reasons you should work in the browser with Office 365
In one of our BlogShed posts, we talk about how there's a huge bulk of organisations that have Office 365 and don’t even realise. That’s because most people have lived and breathed desktop applications at work since the beginning. If you get upgraded to Office 365 and no one tells you, you're not going to notice much difference, you will have the same experience.
Well it ends now, because with Office 365 the real magic happens in the browser. Here's 5 apps you'll find there...
Bye, bye Survey Monkey hello Microsoft Forms
Forms is sometimes described as a survey tool. It’s a tool you can use to collect information from other people, such as feedback, enquiries, sign ups or availability for meetings. The reason people love it so much, is when people submit a form, it collects and analyses the responses for you. Better yet, it can put the live responses in an Excel spreadsheet, so each time a response comes in the spreadsheet will populate instantly.
TIP: Create the form via OneDrive or SharePoint and you will receive live responses into a spreadsheet that gets created with the form and saved in OneDrive/SharePoint.
Keep track of a project using Planner
If you have ever used Trello, this is a very similar tool. Planner is designed to be collaborative and can be used for project management on a small scale. You create task cards, assign them to people and organise them into ‘Buckets’ (Buckets can either be different phases of the project or different types of work). Like most of Microsoft’s ‘born in the web’ apps it’s extremely user friendly, and currently a web based app and mobile app.
TIP: It’s better to create a Plan via an existing Team within Teams or Team Site in SharePoint
Create an internal communication network in Yammer
We worked on a project recently where the whole businesses communication revolved around Yammer. The reason it was easy to get a whole business to adopt this tool is it’s an internal social network, so it’s built with similar features to Facebook. When people logged in each morning their default tab open in the browser was Yammer, so if the CEO or Comms team had posted any announcements, it would be the first thing each employee saw. The bit we love, is it’s interactive meaning if a colleague wished, they could like, comment or share a post keeping everyone engaged. Yammer is a web-based and mobile app.
Change up the weekly newsletter in Sway
We initially describe Sway as a ‘jazzed up PowerPoint’. Instead of starting another mundane Word document, or another death by PowerPoint. We have used it to create interactive and engaging Presentations, Newsletters and Reports (our documents and presentations weren’t that bad, honestly!)
With Sway, you start by adding all your content eg. text and pictures. You can search for and import relevant content from other sources within the app. It’s very much about content first, then you can customise the design. With Sway, you don’t have to have any design skills to make it look impressive, it has a built-in design engine that takes care of making it look pretty. Also, if you decide to keep it to simply text and images, Sway allows you to add focus points to your images so when colleagues are playing your Sway your background images will be slowly moving towards the focus points which draws in the viewers/readers attention. Sway is currently a web based app.
Stop wasting time in Outlook and communicate quicker in Teams
Always leave the best until last.
If you read our Teams blog post, you might have guessed we love the Teams app. It’s the glue that sticks everything together. We currently have a ‘Team’ for a project that ties in everything related to that project... We regularly chat, have online meetings, access the project documents, the project plan (created in Planner), the master project workbook, schedule project meetings, all within the Teams app. Teams can be accessed in the Browser (works best in Chrome or Edge), or it can be installed on the desktop and mobile. It’s a game changer.
We offer demos that showcase all these apps at your office or online. You can enquire about this contact@cloudshedtraining.co.uk or you can enquire here
