Benefits And Challenges Of Office 365 – Have A Detailed Picture
Office 365 is a SaaS or Software-as-a-Service cloud-based service. This type of software comes with a subscription plan. It means you do not have to download & installed the application on local machine to use it. Office 365 gained popularity as a cloud service. But, nowadays, this service gives various features and benefits to the users. Which makes Microsoft Office 365 most used online business suites for the business environment. Along with this, the user also gets the Office 365 challenges too.
So stay with us to know what are the benefits and challenges of Office 365. Here, we are going to discuss all the benefits offered by Office 365 as well as challenges of using it.
Benefits of Office 365
In this section, we are going to discuss the top 10 benefits given by Microsoft Office 365.
1. Easy Collaboration Anywhere Anytime- If you working with the team on any task, documents, and presentations, then you will find a collaboration feature in Office 365. In this feature everyone who needs to contribute to or edit documents, spreadsheet or presentation can work together on the same version and get real-time changes. Rather than having multiple copies. Furthermore, with the help of this feature, you can use shared calendars and team chats with your team members.
2. Ease to Work Anywhere- One of the best and most important features of this service is that you can able to work from anywhere as long as you have internet connectivity. Because it is based on the cloud. Hence, you can access your email, files and Office program like Word, PowerPoint, Excel and many more from anywhere and anytime.
3. Flexibility- Office 365 offers various plans like Office 365 Business, Office 365 Home and also Office 365 Enterprise. So, you can go with any plan according to requirements. Because every plan offers some different features.
4. Always Up to Date- As we know that, Microsoft Office 365 is a cloud-based service which means whenever a user login to its account he/she will access the latest versions. The time is gone when you need to upgrade software or patches. Microsoft continually integrates new features in Office 365 and user will access all the features as soon it introduces.
5. Security Benefit – Microsoft Office has integrated security features to protect your account from phishing, spamming and data breaching. It provides security features like Multi-Factor Authentication, Advanced Threat Protection, Encrypted Data facility with Data Loss Prevention and many more. These security features protect your account and data from catastrophic situations.
6. Enhanced Email Capabilities- Office 365 also has the latest features to enhance your email experience which has a wide range and some of them are mentioned below:
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Boomerang- If you are using the inbox as a to-do list, then the Boomerang feature will be invaluable for you. It acting like as a snooze button for your email, it moves messages to the storage folder and brings back to your inbox at a time you need it.
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Focused Inbox and Clutter- The focused inbox features automatically places what is most relevant emails into one folder and rest of the email into another folder. There is also a clutter feature which de-clutter your inbox on your preference.
7. Reply Email Without Opening it- The Reading Pane feature will allow you to preview the email content, hit reply and send your response in the same main Outlook Windows.
8. Work Offline- Microsoft Office 365 gives you an option to work offline. In this features your OneDrive storage sync with your device, so you can work offline on files. As soon as you reconnect with the internet, the new updates of files will automatically be uploaded to your storage.
9. Power Map in Excel- Power Map is a part of the interactive data visualization feature in Excel. With the help of Power Map feature, you can turn rows of data into a 3D interactive map.
10. Use your Mouse as a laser pointer- By pressing Ctrl+P from your keyboard you can convert your mouse as a laser pointer during your PowerPoint point presentation. This feature has been part of Outlook for years but recently this feature is integrated for touch screen device.
11. Office 365 Planner- This is one of the newest features introduce by Office 365. Office 365 Planner help you and your co-workers to plan workflow and collaboration. You can use this feature to create plans, organize and assign tasks, share files, set dates and provide status updates.
Challenges of MS Office 365
In this section, we are going to discuss all the challenges faced by the user while working with Office 365 account. Let’s Begin
1. Ownership Limits- As we know that, Office 365 belongs to Microsoft and they hosted in Microsoft Datacenters, and those are accessible to authorized Microsoft specialists only. For example, if you have a workflow performance issues, then you have to address to Microsoft Support. And their response can take time. So, in that case you have to wait and not able to fix your problem.
2. Account Provisioning- Office 365 is a cloud-based and when you shift to cloud infrastructure, it is generally outside the purview of your on-prem identity management platform. Microsoft would have you leverage Azure Active Directory, but then you are stuck with managing two identity management system.
3. Performance Issue- In March 2017, due to intermittent Office 365 outage, and all users of Office 365 across the world had difficulties while accessing their OneDrive, Skype for business and Outlook account. These are the reasons which force an organization to have plan B to face this potential Office 365 downtime.
4. Office 365 Backup – Microsoft does not include backup in Office 365 as you need some third party utility such as Office 365 Backup Software to protect data of O365 on the local machine.
Conclusion
Everything has its positive and negative side. Hence, if you are searching for the benefits and challenges of using Office 365, then go through this blog. Because in this blog we try to cover all the Office 365 benefits and challenges.