Office 365
Many of us are accustomed to using the Microsoft Office package. Whether we took the time and expense to purchase a copy or have a pirate copy installed that “came with the computer”, it’s a great tool and one many of us would find it hard to do without for business purposes. Yes of course there are alternatives in the form of OpenOffice, Corel Office and others which serve the purposes of home users, but when it comes to professional business tools it’s hard to find a decent alternative to Microsoft Office.
The problem has been, historically, that its quite an expensive product to buy – the professional edition being almost the same cost as a new computer! However, things have now changed, and for the past few years Microsoft have been offering Microsoft Office on a subscription basis, making it a great, cost effective solution for your business or home office productivity needs. Microsoft Office incorporates Microsoft Word, Excel, PowerPoint, Outlook, Publisher and a number of other products and comes in the basic ‘Personal’ edition that you can buy for around £70 a year through to the business editions that can be combined with a full world class mail server that can be used in conjunction with your domain name to provide a full corporate equivalent email, scheduling and online storage service for your business.
One of the great features of Office 365 is its centrally -stored, online mailbox. This gives you access to your email, calendar and contacts from any device anywhere in the world. The great thing about this centrally-stored mailbox is that it automatically synchronises between all of the devices that you use – so emails sent from your phone for example are also in the sent items on your desktop computer and laptop. It really is a great email system. You can find out more at https://products.office.com/en-gb/business/office
Boomerang
There are a number of great productivity tools that can be added to Office 365, one of the best in my opinion is Boomerang. It’s an add-in to Microsoft Outlook that enables you to do some pretty cool things with your email, like schedule messages to be delivered at a time and date of your choosing. It can also remind you if an email you have sent has not been replied to within a certain period of time. You can find out more about Office Apps and add-ins at https://store.office.com