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O365: Search and Find Data when you need it

 O365: Search and Find Data when you need it


Pervious posts have illustrated how easy it is to create storage in Office 365 and how you can populate the libraries and lists easily from the office PC or from a mobile or tablet when on the move.

We've also looked at the powerful search and find functions within Office 365 and how users can be enabled to locate items for attention, take necessary action and move the items on in the work flow, while maintaining a full control audit at the highest level.

What Data Do We Need?

Following on from that we should consider -
  1. What data should a business be concerned with
  2. Where that data should be stored
  3. How that data should be stored.

Start with Simple Stuff

To start we can consider a customer name, address and contact details. This is the sort of data that may be captured by a sales person working from the office making cold calls or following warm leads, or maybe at the customers premises using a mobile device.

The sales man/woman will store or update the data in a contacts list and more often than not that list will be a personal list.


Up-to-date customer details are worth their weight in gold, but only to the individuals who have access. A customer record on a sales individual's phone is worth precisely nothing to anyone else.

This can, of course, be improved. The business can
  1. Ensure that the sales individual's phone is synchronised with every on else's contact list. Which means lots of synchronisation activity.
  2. Ensure that everyone keys such data into a CRM. Which means that the CRM must have mobile update capability and must be used faithfully by all users.
    That's great, but if you need that customer data for Sales Order Processing, Invoicing, Sales Analysis or for any other business reason, first you have to extract it from the CRM and import it into another package for processing.
  3. Create a Contacts List in Office 365 SharePoint and generate a mobile app that can be attached to MS Teams. 

Using this all staff, office and field based, can create, access and maintain the same data wherever they may be. This data will also be available for use in any other Office 365 application without the need for synchronisation or replication. 

Now Get More Complex

In a more sophisticated environment, an order placed at a customer site with a sales person, can be immediately available -
  1. To the sales back-office, for print and process.
  2. To production, for the reservation and supply of manufacturing resource.
  3. To purchasing, for the ordering of component parts required.

The above scenario requires little in the way of replication, duplication or synchronisation

Don't be afraid to experiment, make Office 365 work for you.

We can show you how, or we can do it for you.


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