Office 365 supports your business to work remote

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In these ever-changing times, the ability for an organisation to adapt and change is what will allow you to stand out from competitors, continue to serve customers, and ensure you maintain momentum. With the current COVID-19 pandemic, we are seeing more and more businesses prepare for social distancing by setting up their systems to allow for remote work and collaboration. At eStorm, we’ve been supporting our customers to ensure they are set-up and using Office 365 to its full potential.

Whether working on a PC, Mac or mobile device from home or in the office, Office 365 is providing workplaces with the tools to continue driving efficiency and productivity. Here are just a few ways Office 365 can support your business in working remotely:

Real-time collaboration

For businesses to continue operating and supporting customers, collaboration on projects and tasks needs to continue. Office 365 provides multiple tools to ensure collaboration doesn’t stop when teams are working remotely. The Microsoft Office suite most of you are used to gives you the ability to have more than one person working on a Word document or Excel file at the same time, and be able to see each other’s work — great for collaboration.

To take it to the next level, there are also a number of newer tools such as SharePoint, Skype for Business and Teams — all designed to help your organisation achieve its goals and provide greater opportunities for workplaces when working remotely.

Teams

Teams is a Microsoft Office 365 tool that allows you to keep your teams communicating, collaborating and working together no matter what location they’re in! The Teams tool is used by businesses to support teams of all sizes, from small teams of 2-5, to large teams of 20-30, even to bigger groups of 100+. No matter the size of your team, Teams provides a great option for organising projects and getting the right people together to have conversations and meetings.

Teams also works as a way of recording and tracking conversations, and offers an easy format for online meetings and chat sessions. Over the last few weeks, we’ve seen more and more businesses take advantage of Teams to ensure they are delivering projects, communicating in a timely manner and continuing to achieve their organisation’s goals.

Microsoft is currently offering a free version of Teams during the COVID-19 pandemic — learn more about the free version and speak to us about how we can support you to set-up Teams today.

A simple tip for your employees when using Teams to facilitate group chats while working remote — if you’re somewhere with a distracting background, there is a handy little ‘background blur’ tool to help reduce distraction and keep teammates focused.

Secure Cloud file storage

Office 365 also allows your team to access files from anywhere, in a secure and safe manner. The cloud-based storage, OneDrive, provides global accessibility and real-time collaboration to support your business in working both in-house and remote as needed. It allows for full visibility, control and collaboration for internal and external stakeholders, as you can easily share documents and control who can view and edit each file. 

Microsoft Office 365 also offers enterprise solutions when it comes to ensuring your business’s documents and work stays secure. Its collection of threat-protection technologies helps protect against spam, malware, viruses, phishing attempts, malicious links, and other cyber threats to your business.

Continuation of business

The huge benefit of Office 365 to businesses is that it offers an easy way to continue ‘business as usual’ no matter what challenges may come your way. The tools are there to help your teams collaborate, plan workflows and tasks, and manage projects. With Office 365, your business can continue to meet its goals and deliver services/products to your customers. 

Need help to get your business working remote using Office 365?

At eStorm, we offer Office 365 support and troubleshooting, as well as deliver general IT Managed Services. What does that mean exactly? With a wide range of plans, deployment options and services, our IT experts can get your business set up and working efficiently in no-time. With access to the latest information and deals on offer, our team is here to support you during the COVID-19 pandemic and into the future.

Why we need to talk about Uploads… Not Downloads…

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optical-fibre-results-nail-world-network-cables-photo-fiber-optic-cablesThis country is home to some very high-tech businesses, and we can access some outstanding services with the quality of internet currently available. Compared to the rest of the world, our download speeds are ok. In the very long and annoying argument about the National Broadband Network, we’re all getting caught up talking about downloads, and for business at least, it’s uploads that really matter.

Australian Bureau of Statistics Internet Activity data shows that Australians are downloading nearly an entire exabyte of data, one million terabytes, every quarter.

Over two million Australians get download speeds of higher than 24Mbps, and another 6.25 million get between 8 and 24Mbps. When you’re watching cat videos on YouTube, downloading a game from Steam, or getting the latest episode of Game Of Thrones (from iTunes or another paid service of course), these speeds are acceptable.

So what does this means? Well, our download speeds are ahead of the world average, although the gap is closing. But each year since 2008, we have been falling further and further behind in upload speeds. Where we once placed 48th in the world for uploads, we’re now 100th.

When YouTube launched in 2005, I had an ADSL connection. I had around 6Mbps download, and around 800k uploads. This was fine for sending email, or uploading a short video… but it’s over a decade later… and while my downloads are now up to a whopping 12Mbps (sarcastic tone required), my uploads are… yep… around 800k. People all over the world are now uploading High Res footage to YouTube. I won’t be doing that from home any time soon. My phone can shoot more bytes worth of video data in a second than I can upload to YouTube in one minute.

With the roll-out of NBN, upload speeds will improve. Even the most basic NBN service should get a minimum download speed of 25Mbps and, more importantly, an upload speed of 5Mbps. But the disparity between those speeds is, when talking about the internet, pretty big.

So while NBN takes us forward, it’s still not going to be the best solution for all businesses… especially those embracing the advantages of cloud services. Add to that the fact that most people don’t have access to NBN yet.

The good news is that if you want to use cloud services, you don’t have to wait for the NBN to get to you. There are better services already available now.

We have plans available that give you upload speeds ranging from 10Mbps all the way up to 1Gbps.

If you want to know what internet connections are available to you, please get in touch with the eStorm team. We can perform a site qualification and give you an obligation free quote.