For some, chat-centric such as Hipchat and Slack apps are helping supplement email communications in the enterprise. However, email remains the foundation of collaborative work across various mediums, time zones, and business endeavors.
With that being said, Microsoft is looking to pivot its vast knowledge emailing to help companies make the best of cloud-based email solutions to save time.
Using its Business Academy training tools, Microsoft is suggesting 5 best practices when using cloud-based email solutions to optimize work environments for time efficiency.
#1—Eliminate hardware or solution maintenance
Moving your email to the cloud means no more attention wasted on onsite servers. Additionally, migration and continuous software updates can help decrease (or even eliminate) maintenance-related downtime. Without the need for on-premises hardware upkeep, your IT team has more time to take on other projects.
#2—Avoid costly downtime
Every moment your email is down costs your company in a number of ways. With onsite email solutions, updates, scaling, and other threats could potentially lead to downtime. In 2016, unplanned outages cost companies up to $2.4 billion, according to research by the Ponemon Institute. That’s more than double the cost in 2010. The top three factors costing your company during downtime? Business disruption, lost revenue and reduced employee productivity, the report states.
#3—Seamless integration means more efficiency
Don’t bog down your teams with clumsy servers and cumbersome integration processes. An integrated email solution saves time and energy for your employees. Additionally, cloud-based email has rapid application delivery, which helps ensure that business processes remain efficient.
#4—Easily scale and update
Cloud email solutions provide you with the ability to quickly scale and update—saving your IT team a lot of headaches. Companies that migrate to cloud-based email see the benefits of standardized and automated functionality.
#5—Better security and compliance
For many industries and businesses, security and compliance are vital to ensure trust and help follow strict regulations. Unfortunately, maintaining high-security standards and adhering to compliance regulations takes a lot of time and hinders productivity when managing it on your own. Effective cloud-based secure email solutions help organizations comply with global, regional and industry-specific requirements like healthcare (HIPAA), government and homeland security (FISMA), education (FERPA), and banking. And applications stay up-to-date with evolving privacy compliance standards.
Microsoft’s Office 365 team continues to add new course lessons and helpful tidbits to its online Business Academy section such as today’s notes on cloud-based email. Most of the courses are free and readily available via blogs and video tutorials on either Microsoft’s Channel 9, YouTube or Business Academy websites.