Microsoft was long the leader in software applications for business, until entrepreneurs and small businesses started realizing that Google Apps for Work looked a lot better to the bottom line.
 
A change, however, is a-brewing. According to a recent story in Business Insider, Microsoft Office 365 has pulled ahead of Apps for Work because, it appears, IT executives have concluded that there is not enough support from Google to justify keeping their employees happy on Google.
 
When it comes down to it, your business needs access to sales and support teams. You need to know how to best use the product, how to make it work in your particular environment, and how to plan for the future.
 
We see most of our clients transitioning to Office 365 as they move their infrastructures to the cloud. It is relatively easy to add your data and users, and it’s a quick way to get to a highly functional enterprise environment that can be accessed securely from anywhere with an Internet connection. It’s another one of the “level the playing field” kind of tools, giving small businesses access to the same efficiency-raising solutions that historically were available only to large corporations.
 
Here are a few tips to making Office 365 work for your business:

1. Leadership. Younger employees have a tendency to default to Google. The only way you’ll get complete buy-in is if leadership is using it and communicating the success they’re having.
    
2. Insights. Create “tidbits” of knowledge to share with your team. Create a 30-second video, include the tip-of-the-week in your email signature – whatever you do, find a way to provide snack-sized bites of ways to get buy-in.
    
3. Mobility. We love that you can access your data from any device at any time with Office 365. The more you use it, the more the value becomes clear, especially when it comes to collaboration.

In short, if you’re like most small businesses you need manageability, security and reliability. Microsoft has improved significantly in those areas, and the result is that many are returning from Google for that reason. Travelers specifically like the idea of having access to their apps when offline.
 
There are many good reasons that Office 365 is Microsoft's fastest-growing commercial product ever, and is now the No. 1 deployed application in the enterprise. If you’re considering being one of the nearly 50 million active business users each month, let our team of experts help you deploy, host and take full advantage of Office 365’s collaboration and productivity-enhancing tools.
 
Shaun Olsen is the CEO and president of CloudWyze. CloudWyze was created to help businesses focus and perform at their optimal level by crafting and executing custom technology plans for businesses of every type and size. To learn more about CloudWyze, visit www.CloudWyze.com. Shaun can be reached at [email protected] or (910) 795-1000.