4 WAYS OFFICE 365 EMPOWERS SMALL BUSINESSES Office 365 provides you with online versions of popular business tools like Microsoft Word, Excel, PowerPoint and Outlook. But if that’s all you know about it, you’re missing out on some of the biggest benefits it offers your small business. Let’s look at four of the core advantages of an Office 365 subscription:

#1: TAKE CONTROL OVER YOUR EMAILPROBLEM: Office 365 is the first hosted email platform to give you the admin-level control and feature sets of a traditional on-premise platform. Until recently, choosing an email solution required you make a choice. You could use hosted email and pay a set cost per mailbox, which reduced your IT infrastructure costs but sacrificed a lot of features. Or you could make an expensive upfront investment and host your own server to keep administrative control in-house.

SOLUTION: Office 365 offers the best of both worlds. Because you pay per user, you avoid costly balloon payments and can easily scale according to your business needs. And Office 365’s full set of IT admin features, which you can access anytime from your desktop or mobile device, gives you the account control you require without the financial or productivity drain of purchasing and maintaining your own servers. A realty company, for example, has been using the flexibility of PowerShell scripting to transition into a shared mailbox architecture (a helpful and free resource for multiple employees to utilize a shared corporate account) that previously wasn’t available as an option. Having the ability to script in PowerShell means less manual work for IT and faster turnaround.

#1: TAKE CONTROL OVER YOUR EMAIL

#2: ENSURE SEAMLESS EXPERIENCE ACROSS DEVICESPROBLEM: Neither you nor your employees likely spend the entire day sitting in front of a desktop computer. You work in the office, at home, on the road and at various points in between. Which means you need access to reliable tools wherever you happen to be.

SOLUTION: Microsoft recognizes this and prioritizes developing Office 365 in an effort called Mobile First. Many platforms still follow the model of developing desktop software first, which typically leads to stripped-down mobile versions that are clunky to use. By putting mobile first, Office 365 ensures you get the same user experience on a laptop or desktop computer, tablet or smartphone. For one of our customers, a film production company, this enables its employees to be productive whether they’re in the office, on location, or travelling in between.

#2: ENSURE SEAMLESS EXPERIENCE ACROSS DEVICES

#3: ENJOY THE LATEST AND GREATEST VERSION

PROBLEM: Remember when you had to wait several years to get a major update to your software? Or you had to suffer through a difficult and time-consuming migration to get your employees up to speed with the newest version?

SOLUTION: Office 365 is constantly developing and evolving to meet the business needs of customers, being one of Microsoft’s first evergreen solutions. New feature sets can roll out in as little as 90 days and are automatically deployed to all of your users. This past summer, for example, Microsoft Planner was rolled out to Office 365 customers worldwide. No action by Office 365 admins was needed, as the Planner tile simply appeared in users’ Office 365 app launcher.

This recently helped a magazine and publishing company that had reorganized their teams and projects around Office 365 Groups to take advantage of Planner’s teamwork capabilities. When Planner was introduced into Groups, the teams were able to easily integrate it into their workflow — and organize and accomplish tasks more quickly.

#3: ENJOY THE LATEST AND GREATEST VERSION

#4: RELY ON RACKSPACE’S FANATICAL SUPPORTPROBLEM: You’ve got a business to run and we know that when it comes to migrating to Office 365 and training your employees to use it, your time, energy and resources are limited. That’s why our Fanatical Support comes with your Office 365 subscription.

SOLUTION: If you possess the technical knowledge, you can use our service tools to migrate your email, set up user accounts and perform other processes to get yourself up and running. If you want more assistance, a dedicated Rackspace Fanatical Support staff member will partner with you to guide you through each step of the migration process. They’ll also be available 24x7x365 for any ongoing support you may need, such as troubleshooting software issues or helping you understand new app features and how they can enable you and your employees be more effective. After all, our success depends on your success. We’ll work as hard as you do to make your business a success.

#4: RELY ON RACKSPACE’S FANATICAL SUPPORT

Read more about how Office 365 and Rackspace can help empower your small business:https://www.rackspace.com/office-365

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