There isn't probably a man who is successful in business and does not take some part of his job online.
Also if you are doing most of the work online, like we do, you have probably had one of those bad luck situations where you desperately need a document or some other data from your PC, but that data is out of reach at the moment. For us personally we have had many of those situations, sometimes due to our bad organization, others due to wrong solutions.
We have used many good cloud services such as Google cloud solutions, UnlimCloud.com, Dropbox and others. Unfortunately none of those services have been the right fit for us. Since we are tied to Windows since the beginning of our business as most of the web users, Word, Excel and PowerPoint are regular part of our workday.
As we own a company blog, crossing blog writing with our daily activities has become completely normal. We had a lot of situations when we need that missing document on a meeting outside of our company, or that we need to edit some document that has been left at the office.
Our troubles have ended completely when we started using Office 365. The only problem was that we have already bought couple of Office licenses for our company PCs before thinking about Office 365.
So, we will explain briefly how Office 365 was good for us. In order to satisfy our business needs completely, we first tried Office 365 Small Business premium package.
For a price just over $150, we have received so much stuff, that we forgot what we got.
The most important things are installations of the latest versions of Microsoft Word, Excel, PowerPoint, OneNote, Access, Publisher, Outlook, Lync and InfoPath.
The thing we would like to note, is that now we do not think where we are working, and on what device. It is enough that we login to our account and everything we work on is available at the cloud. It is available for both, our employees and our clients. We can share the document with our clients and allow them editing privileges so we can work on an important document together, without worrying whether that particular PC or client has Office installed or not.
With Office 365 we are working with the latest versions of office software, and we have stopped thinking about upgrades to new versions. At any given time Office 365 applies the latest version. The thing that is especially interesting is that we can now work from iPad and write texts in Word, Excel and all necessary programs. We don't have to worry whether we can modify the PowerPoint presentation, and we do not have to carry our laptops with us everywhere. This really comes in handy if somehow we forget to carry the presentation with us to a meeting or workshop. In matter of seconds we can open it, and all we need is an internet access which is nowadays available everywhere.
OneDrive currently supplies you with 25 GB of space, but it is expected to be upgraded to 1 TB, and when that is complete, we will definitely stop worrying about saving of all of our business data and thinking about RAID and other backup solutions.
Outlook supplies 50 GB of space in its mailbox, and allows sending of 25 MB attachments via emails, which can really be a useful thing at times, even though we share files over OneDrive.
With this small business premium package we have received Lync application, which allows us to make conference calls with the ability to record audio and video of every meeting.
At the end we would like to sum up our impressions about Office 365. We are now definitely online nomads that have their office wherever they are, no matter if we have our computer, tablet or phone with us.
All we require is our login and password, and all our documents, media and data are available for us, as well as Office with all latest versions of their apps. Our warm recommendation is that everyone tries this product. Just pick package that suits your needs and make your work easier.
