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How to Improve Businesses and Processes with Office 365

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Hugh Olssen
How to Improve Businesses and Processes with Office 365

Once the initial excitement of running Office 365 has subsided, organizations will typically spend some time reviewing their existing business processes to identify how Office 365 can improve. It is almost impossible to move all processes at once, but identifying and improving the most commonly used ones will certainly help to adopt Office 365 throughout the organization.

Office 365 has many tools and can be challenging to downsize to get a full picture of the pros and cons that can affect the development process.

 

Selecting the Right Office 365 Tool

When our clients want to improve the business process in Office 365 with a tool with no or low code, we start with three options: Microsoft Forms, SharePoint Lists / Libraries, and PowerApps. The first thing we consider is the current state of the business process and its complexity.

If the process starts with something like simply entering data into an Excel spreadsheet with minimal logic, Microsoft Forms might be appropriate. Microsoft Forms functions well for people who are not very technical and need something simple and easy to manage the form. The biggest contribution of Microsoft Forms is that it offers minimal field types and logic options.

 

Finding Your Business Process, Finding the "Flow"

Once the business process is home, the next step is to determine how the process should go. Use Microsoft Visio or any other similar tool to copy the exact process. Are there approval stages? How much? Should that data be transferred elsewhere when the process is complete? These are just some of the goal settings that you can use.

The main workflow tool used to be SharePoint Designer. While this is still an option, many people using Office 365 have turned their attention to Flow in order to replace SharePoint Designer workflows.

Just like PowerApps, Flow comes with a learning curve. I feel that this learning curve is more serious for those who have worked with Designer for years. If you are unfamiliar with workflows, Flow is a much more useful version of Designer.

I notice painfully from painful personal experience that infinite loops are much more common with Flow, but improved login helps in those situations.

Flow has some pre-built templates that come in handy. An example is a template that automatically submits data submitted to Microsoft Forms to a SharePoint directory. This is perfect if you like the Microsoft Forms user experience but need the SharePoint directory data to either sign up or continue a more complex business process.

Anyway, if you own a business and need everything to be in place, i.e., to have a proper backup for your critical Office 365 data, since Microsoft is not offering you the backup required, then you can settle another type of Office 365 backup, by including a third-party solution.

One of the best solutions for Office 365 is developed by Altaro. Altaro Office 365 backup is an all-in-one package for businesses across the globe.

You can feel safe and secure with Altaro as they are a company with a proven record for software backup.

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Hugh Olssen
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