More businesses are moving their critical business applications to the cloud. These subscriptions are important tools. Many have chosen, and we recommend, Office 365 to manage business email. Yet there are so many apps that are included with most business level Office 365 subscriptions that most businesses are paying for, but are not even using.
Teams
With Slack gaining popularity among business users, Microsoft has been able to see what features the users like most, and incorporate them into their chat application. Teams is the result of a lot of research, and continues to offer improved features that might just leave the competition behind.
When you have a choice between paying for an additional chat app like Slack, and getting access to one that is already included in a subscription you are paying for, it’s almost a no-brainer.
One Note
While this note taking/keeping application has been around for a long time, it is still one of the best places to keep notebooks of information. The ability to organize your notes into various notebooks, groupings and pages makes it feel like a binder.
This application is a perfect place to keep training materials, documentation about various processes within the company, and even standard weekly meeting notes. Once you start using OneNote, you may not be able to stop.
Microsoft To Do
Another more recent addition to Microsoft’s offering is their robust To Do list application. Much like Teams, To Do is constantly being updated with features that people have been requesting. While it had a rocky start with its lackluster feature set, the latest version has just about everything you want in a To Do list application.
You can group tasks into different topics, you can add subtasks to any To Do item, and even create recurring tasks. These tasks will automatically sync up with Outlook, so you can view your to do items from any location.
Planner
This application is another copycat of a popular business tool. This time Microsoft is going after project management applications like Trello. Much like those applications, you have the ability to organize your project with Kanban boards they call buckets. It also includes charts that help you visualize the overall progress on the project.
Flow
To take on If This Then That or Zapier, Microsoft has also developed a workflow tool, aptly named Flow. There are a ton of templates already created to browse through and choose from like automatically saving email attachments to OneDrive. You are also able to tie it into other apps that are not Microsoft products to help you become super productive.
Spending a little bit of time looking through some of the apps that are included in your Office 365 subscription could end up saving you money on some of the similar apps you are already using. Before you go canceling all of your other subscriptions though, make sure it has all of the features you use frequently. While a lot of these apps are pretty feature rich, some of them are still just getting started. You can bet that Microsoft will continue to put significant effort into developing these apps to compete with the other popular enterprise level cloud services that already exist. They want Office 365 to dominate the business space, and it looks like they are well on their way to achieving that goal.