Office365

The Pros and Cons of Office 365

For any business organization moving to the cloud can be a big and checksum deal and can be a cumbersome process to all working within. While moving to a cloud-based system like Office 365 has some major advantages. Let's see if it’s right for you is to look at the major pros and cons of Office 365:

Pros of Office 365

Work Anywhere

One of the vital advantages of Office 365 is the ability to work from anywhere as long as you have an internet connection. It’s entirely cloud-based, can access your email, files and Office programs (Word, PowerPoint, Excel) from any place and any internet device. If you have a plan that includes desktop version of MS Office, they can be installed on up to 5 devices per user.

This is especially helpful for all companies with remote working employees, multiple locations and companies with employees who travel often to present their company.

Collaborate smoothly

If working in large teams is part of your company, you’ll like the collaboration features of Office 365. With this, you get one version at a time requesting from all.

All who needs to contribute to a document (or spreadsheet, or presentation, etc), can work on the same version (and get real-time changes) rather than having multiple version. You can also share direct access to your files, rather than send files as attachments. This means people can make changes to one file rather than having multiple copies of the same document. Versioning is included in case you need to go to back to an older version.

Have Access to the Latest Versions

With Office 365, you’ll also have access to the latest versions of Office at no additional cost. You’ll get latest and greatest features without having to uninstall and re-install MS Office on everyone’s machines in your organization. In addition, Microsoft is constantly making upgrades to features across programs – you’ll get access to those, too.

Subscription-Based Payment

Office 365 is a subscription-based service to its users, you pay a low monthly fee (per user) rather than a large upfront amount. This can be helpful for a cash flow related calculations. Plans are typically paid monthly or yearly as per selection.

Security Features

One of the biggest misconceptions about the Cloud-based system is that it’s not safe. It’s all in how you use your login and what security measures you put in place for the configuration. Office 365 has a lot of built-in security features. These features include:

· Encrypted email: This encryption keeps anyone other than the intended recipient from reading your email.

· Data Loss Prevention: This is a set of prevention policies that check and prevents sensitive information (like social security nos.) from leaving your organization via email.

· Mobile Device Management: These brilliant features allow you to control Office on your phones to protect company information. If an employee’s phone is lost or stolen, it can be remotely wiped to prevent anyone who shouldn’t have access to getting to company’s information.

· Advanced Threat Analytics (ATA): This uses analytics and machine learning to detect and alert you to suspicious behavior on your network. This will scan emails as they come into your network for malicious links and attachments and if it detects something fishy, it’ll prevent the malicious attachment from getting in. Your employees will still get the email, but will get a message explaining why the attachment isn’t available.

Cons of Office 365

Internet is must

Office 365 is a cloud-based service, if you don’t have an internet connection you may not be able to access your documents. If your company has a slow internet or faulty internet connection, this shall be not the best option for you.

There are many options to overcome some of this if you have an expected downtime. You won’t be able to access your email, but you can sync your documents to your desktop and use desktop versions of MS Office programs.

Subscription Based

If you’d rather just spend a large amount every year for your Office programs and server and not have to worry about it every month, Office 365 isn’t going to be a great option for you. Yearly subscriptions could be a happy medium, though – often you can get a discount.

Keep up with changing features

The features in Office 365 do change frequently. On one hand, you always have access to the latest and great versions. On the other hand, it can be difficult to keep up sometimes if you use some of the lesser known programs like Delve and Yammer.

Most people only use 25% of the functionality

This isn’t really a con of Office 365 itself, but worth noting. A majority of users don’t use Office 365 to its full advantage. Most people use only Office 365 for email, file storage and access to Office programs, even though it has so much more to offer.

There certainly isn’t anything wrong with this – but it may mean you’re paying for more than what you need. If you do move to Office 365, it’s a good idea to do a gut check every few months to see what parts are actually being used. You may be able to move some employees down to a cheaper plan to without losing functionality.

Conclusion
Moving to cloud-based system needs planning. I recommend starting a 30 days free subscription https://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/library/office-365-plan-options.aspx to any plan as per your needs and experience all functionalities of Office 365.