Chris A Watkins - Business

The take up of Office 365 is huge , and it is growing by the day. But, what is driving this growth?     Read the reports being published, search the web, listen to the newly emerging 'experts' and the main attraction is that O365 offers very much lower cost per user than conventional local area network. The savings are derived from -   1. Large amounts of free cloud storage per user license.   2. Bundled Office applications (Word, Excel, Power Point etc.).   3. The O365 suite is web based and may be accessed by almost any machine that runs an Internet browser, so many users don't even need a full blown PC to use it.     Sound enough reasons for any business to start planning a move to Office 365. However, a good IT service provider or consultant will advise customers of the many issues to be taken into account at the start of any such planning.     The first of these is that Office 365 is SharePoint on-line. That means, apart from

Business System Interfacing with O365 We all use business systems, these are the software items we employ, like payroll software, accounting software and industry specific applications that make sure we run our businesses within a framework of rules. We can't do without them in many cases as the software vendor spends megabucks ensuring that the checks and balances within the software keep us on the legal and moral straight and narrow. This means licencing particular users within the organisation to use and maintain them and this in turn sometimes leads to situations where a few users, or sometimes one user, becomes 'keeper of the key', holding business vital data that only they can access or disseminate. Most business systems offer reporting functions where selected business essential data can be extracted and distributed to none licenced operatives for use outside the system. Such data is often extracted in some form of textual flat file, such as Comma-Separate