Coping with COVID-19: remaining productive and how OnePlace Solutions is contributing

The outbreak of coronavirus (COVID-19), has caused unprecedented disruption to how we work. People and businesses are on tenterhooks waiting to see what happens next as the situation unfolds. Many businesses have already enacted work-from-home policies where possible, causing businesses to rethink how to implement processes and technology for people to remain productive and businesses to continue to function and serve their customers.

More employees will work from home

Businesses with the tools and infrastructure in place to enable employees to work from home will be less disrupted. However, for businesses without the tools or infrastructure, it is uncommon for individuals to work from home, let alone everyone in an organization on an extended basis. Clear processes and technology can help create a more collaborative, digital workplace and will help businesses remain as efficient as possible, while also providing an important level of social connection to colleagues.

The challenges of working from home

It should be acknowledged that not all businesses can simply have employees work from home and continue to operate. Any extended period of lockdown will, unfortunately, have dire consequences to many employees and business owners.

Assuming people have an appropriate work area and connectivity while working from home, it is important to implement tools, training, and processes so that workers can continue to be effective.

For those teams that can work from home, the challenges around information management, collaboration, and productivity they can potentially experience can include:

• information silos: people keeping critical information locked in personal inboxes
• duplicate content: people sending attachments via email rather than a link to a single instance of a document in a location such as Microsoft SharePoint, Microsoft Teams, or OneDrive
• communication barriers: with a lack of personal interaction, it's harder to facilitate knowledge sharing and short, high-value conversations on a topic
• technology best practice: in the event of unplanned, extended periods of working from home, people need to be given best practice guidance on how to most effectively use the technology available
• change: for some users, change is a significant challenge so it's important to provide the tools to minimize disruption for end-users using Microsoft Outlook. This includes providing access to content centrally stored in SharePoint, Teams, or OneDrive and letting people shift conversations from Outlook to Teams.

Overcoming the challenges with information management and a collaborative digital workplace

There are many facets to making a work-from-home policy work effectively, ensuring best-practice information management and collaboration continue. Here are some of the ways the key work-from-home challenges can be addressed:

• information silos: online collaboration and communication tools such as Teams and SharePoint let users share information quickly and securely
• duplicate content: teams can save information into SharePoint or Teams effortlessly using OnePlaceMail, avoiding duplicates and managing versions
• communication barriers: Teams lets you have a face-to-face conversation from anywhere, removing the need to be in the same physical space to collaborate 
• technology best practice: training or providing user guides on new technology is essential for end-users who are inexperienced with working-from-home tools
• change: companies should use tools that let end users stay in familiar environments, such as Outlook, rather than have to learn how to use a new system.

Using OnePlace Solutions software, businesses can make it simple for users to share information and collaborate seamlessly and securely using Teams or SharePoint, even if they're not already familiar with these applications. Users can share information with their colleagues with just a few clicks and be assured that the documents they're accessing are the latest and most correct versions and that an important file isn't locked on someone's desktop while they're on sick leave.

Combining the OnePlaceMail App with Teams, SharePoint, and OneDrive means businesses can remain highly productive even as their staff members work from home.

With the right combination of cloud-based tools, employees can be just as effective and productive from home as they could be in the office. This can help minimize the disruption caused by COVID-19, letting organizations conduct normal operations including meetings and close collaboration, all without requiring team members, customers, partners, or suppliers to come face to face with each other during this critical time.

How OnePlace Solutions is helping business impacted by COVID-19

As the community pulls together, businesses are trying to play their part.

Microsoft has already announced it will make its full-featured version of Teams available for free on a six-month trial to help companies affected by the COVID-19 outbreak to remain productive during this uncertain time.

OnePlace Solutions (People's Choice Microsoft 365 award winner) has followed suit, offering the OnePlaceMail App for free until June 30, 2020. The free offer will include all product features, including:

• saving emails and attachments to SharePoint, Teams, and OneDrive
• classifying content with the automatic capture of email attributes and any other metadata as per your SharePoint environment
• ability to insert from SharePoint, Teams, and OneDrive as either links or attachments.

The solution works on every Microsoft Outlook environment, including Windows, web browsers, macOS, iOS and Android phones. The free offer is provided on a fair-use basis. For simplicity, the free OnePlaceMail offer can be centrally deployed from the Office 365 Admin Center.

We're proud to help businesses get maximum value from Teams and SharePoint and minimize the disruptive impact on employees.

Get started using the OnePlaceMail App for free until June 30, 2020

Greater productivity and information management with a distributed workforce

OnePlaceMail extends Outlook's connection with SharePoint, Teams, and OneDrive. This minimizes change for end users and makes it easy to capture, classify, and access content from these locations when in Outlook. The extension works in every Outlook environment and is available for download in Microsoft AppSource.

To find out more about how OnePlace Solutions can help businesses remain productive during this time, contact us today.