Is your business’s email giving you headaches? If so, you’re not alone. Fortunately, there’s a solution available that will allow you slash the time you spend worrying about emails and concentrate on what you do best — running your business. So, what is the best solution you ask? Office 365 Exchange Online of course!
No business can manage without email nowadays, but more importantly your email must do the jobs you need it to efficiently, without creating serious risks for your business. Perhaps your current system’s communication limitations are damaging your productivity. Perhaps regular downtime is creating a drain on your IT budget. Perhaps the data you exchange by email is at risk, threatening your ability to comply with GDPR.
What you need is a business-class email system that’s powerful, reliable and adaptable to your requirements. Our recommendation to meet all these needs is Office 365 Exchange Online. This helps you protect your data, at the same time as letting your employees connect with email, calendar and contacts.
Not only is Office 365 Exchange Online reliable and secure — it allows access from any authorised device, wherever your people happen to be.
So what can this system offer you?
1. Keep Your Data Together
Exchange enables you to set up a large inbox and have an archive in place. Instead of having to search for emails in multiple locations, your employees will be have the choice of keeping them in the primary inbox or of archiving them.
Strong retention policies are important, but you don’t want this to slow your employees down. Using Exchange can keep retention powerful and flexible and your people productive at the same time.
2. Protect Sensitive Data
It’s frighteningly easy for an employee to accidentally send sensitive data to the wrong person, breaching your compliance obligations. Exchange’s new DLP features help you prevent this, through deep content analysis that identifies, monitors and safeguards this data.
DLP also includes built-in policies using essential regulatory standards like PII and PCI, and you can add in bespoke policies as required. Users will also be alerted by Outlook’s Policy Tips if they’re in danger of violating policies.
3. Make Compliance Simpler
Compliance regulations, as well as internal compliance, requires that data is pulled together from across your organisation and held secure. Your compliance officers can achieve this much more easily by using the new eDiscovery Centre, which lets you reduce the cost of managing compliance, while at the same time ensuring you’re prepared for anything.
This allows your compliance officers to search data from Exchange, SharePoint and Lync across the organisation, identifying and analysing it. You can hold the data where it is, so you don’t have to create a separate data store, which would also need managing.
4. Manage Email Threats
Spam, phishing and malware such as viruses are a perennial danger to any organisation using email. Exchange backs up the training you give your people with powerful defences against these and many other email threats.
This includes multi-layered filtering against spam and phishing emails, which multiple anti-malware engines identifies and blocks virus attacks. All these defences are constantly updated, so they provide an effective guard against the latest threats — before they even reach your inbox.
5. Enable Collaboration
Collaborations and team-work are vital for efficient business, and using Exchange, SharePoint and Outlook together makes this far more efficient. Exchange handles the messaging, SharePoint provides document storage, co-authoring and versioning, while Outlook coordinates the complete user experience.
This means that new people joining a team or collaboration will both have immediate access to the latest versions of documents and see the previous communications relevant to the project. These tools will provide your employees with the opportunity to increase their productivity, while making it easier for you to manage the data by keeping it in one place.
6. Manage Your Messaging Systems
The Exchange Administration Centre is a web-based administration interface that’s easy to use, keeping all your administration needs together. It allows you to manage your capabilities, such as DLP, Apps for Outlook and site mailboxes.
Access can be controlled by role, meaning your specialists and help-desk staff won’t need full administrative permissions to perform specific tasks that arise. This allows you to delegate management of Exchange with confidence and concentrate on running your business.
7. An Efficient Inbox
It’s essential for your employees’ efficiency and productivity that they’re working with an inbox that’s clean and uncluttered. Even more vital, in today’s highly mobile business world, is that they should have the same experience on any device, in any location.
Using Exchange and Outlook together provides an intuitive, touch-enabled inbox that adapts readily to any device. Relevant information is optimised for different form-factors, while the superb design of Outlook’s desktop interface is extended to the mobile and browser interfaces.
8. Enjoy a Flexible Cloud
Many Cloud packages are inflexible, forcing you to accept elements you don’t need in order to have those you do need. Exchange provides flexible tools and hybrid models that allow you to move to the Cloud on your own terms.
Maybe all you need is overnight onboarding to the Cloud, or maybe your business needs suit a hybrid mailbox deployment, both on site and online. Exchange allows you to integrate calendars, scheduling and meetings between the two with minimal disruption, as well as previewing upgrades before accepting them.
9. It’s Your Office 365 Exchange Online
Exchange can be easily customised to meet your needs. This includes integrating the web-based Apps for Office of your choice into Outlook and the Outlook web app.
This means your users can switch between apps with a minimum of time and effort, as well as allowing a single sign-in across multiple apps, with the option of restricting access to apps where appropriate. Exchange’s extension model offers straightforward plugin access to your web-based Outlook.
All Your Contacts Together
In the modern business world, networks are rarely straightforward, and your users may have contacts stored in other networks. This can slow them down and damage their productivity, if they have to be logging off one network and logging onto another on a regular basis.
Exchange allows them to bring all their contact information together. It will even proactively consolidate it, creating a single contact card that avoids the inefficiency of duplication.
Office 365 Exchange Online is a powerful tool, especially when combined with Outlook, that will streamline your systems, allowing your employees to reduce inefficiency and boost their productivity. If you want to know more about how it could benefit you, you’re very welcome to get in touch with us.
