These days the modern workplace can be anywhere you have an internet connection, with so much information, entertainment and communication available in the palm of your hand we all have the potential to be overwhelmed with constant alerts, updates and notifications. Luckily our friends at Microsoft have an arsenal of productivity tools to help you be more productive, with the goal to make you less busy and work smarter.
Here are our top three Microsoft productivity tools:
Microsoft Outlook:
The Microsoft Outlook app allows you to take your email anywhere, this is great if you want to be able to work anywhere, at any time. However as most people receive over 90 emails a day managing emails can become a full time job.
The Microsoft Outlook app allows you to limit the chaos in your inbox by enabling you to quickly unsubscribe from unwanted communications and use the inbuilt Sweep feature to delete current emails and future emails from an unwanted contact. You can also set up inbox rules to move emails to a folder or automatically delete based on criteria you set up. All saving you time daily.
Imagine you are working on a project with a strict deadline, Outlook empowers you to set up rules that send all emails related to this project to a project folder. Saving you time sifting through the 90+ emails you get daily, you can head straight to the project folder and get to work on the tasks that require your urgent attention.
The OnePlaceMail App extends the productivity of Outlook by allowing you to save emails and their attachments into Microsoft SharePoint from Outlook on any device.
Microsoft Teams:
Microsoft Teams is a collaboration tool with enterprise grade security designed to increase productivity. You can use Teams to chat, hold online meetings or share files with the added personality of stickers and GIFS.
Teams is effective for having conversations with your internal team who you work closely with daily. It allows fast flowing chat, transparency of your groups work so you can easily follow what is happening with a project and save time by having all communications in one place.
In today's modern workplace we need to work in both email and Microsoft Teams to do our jobs most efficiently, the OnePlaceMail App was developed to allow you to quickly and simply move a conversation from Outlook email to Teams. Microsoft Outlook app users can save an email and its attachments directly to any Microsoft Teams channel that they have access to. Not only can they quickly share information, the OnePlaceMail App has the option to notify your team and add any additional comments to enable effective communication.
Imagine Jan the Marketing Manager is working on an exhibition and has been asked about her technical requirements for the exhibition booth, this unfortunately is not her area of expertise. Rather than sending an email to her internal technical team, who may reply-all or individually leaving Jan to sift through numerous emails to find the answer she needs, she moves the email conversation she received from the exhibition organizers to the technical channel in Microsoft Teams. She can quickly get feedback from the team on the exhibition booth requirements and all team members can see other replies saving duplication. This is great example of how Teams can save you time - see how this works.
Microsoft Flow:
Microsoft Flow allows you to automate workflows between your favourite apps (Microsoft and non-Microsoft apps) and services to get notified of information you need, synchronize files and collect data. Designed to enable you to work less but achieve more. Flow saves you time by automating routine, repetitive tasks.
You can set up automated notifications for when an action has taken place, this is great,for example, if you work in sales and what to be alerted when a new hot lead has come in. If you work in marketing you could set up a workflow to be notified when someone mentions you in social media rather than having to interrupt your working day to keep checking in to your social accounts hourly.
Flow allows you to copy files to different locations, automate data collection, get approvals and sync calendars together and hundreds of other repetitive tasks you might do. You can schedule a Flow to work immediately, hourly, daily, weekly, monthly etc - once set up you can let Flow do the work for you, saving you time having to repeat a task regularly.
The beauty of Flow is it already has pre-built workflows to connect commonly connected apps and services, again saving you time and effort having to set them up from scratch. Flow supports automation and workflows between over 100 services.
Are you using these productivity tools already? Do you have other tools you use to save you time? Share in the comments below.
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