Microsoft Office 365 has become a well-entrenched productivity, business and collaboration tool, used by organisations across the globe. In fact, Microsoft Office 365 usage continues to accelerate significantly across organisations of all sizes and outperforms the competition, according to a recent article by Cloud Tech.

Organisations are also using Office 365 Business Premium to standardise business tools and are, in fact, replacing some with applications that come standard with the suite: A few examples include:

• Replacing expensive conference calling apps with Skype for Business Online;

• Removing internal chat systems and opting for Microsoft Teams;

• Replacing a legacy internal Wiki with hosted Microsoft SharePoint; and

• Moving away from cloud storage services like Dropbox in favour of OneDrive.

"Microsoft Office 365 Business Premium is a comprehensive offering that includes almost everything a user could need. It is optimised for the workforce-on-the-go and comes with features such as Exchange e-mail and the online, desktop and mobile versions of of the suite for easy accessibility," says Michael Watts, business unit manager: Microsoft at Drive Control Corporation (DCC), a Microsoft supplier for South Africa and the SADC region.

"Business Premium is definitely the choice for organisations that want to provide their employees with a solution that is available whether they are travelling, at home or on their phones, tablets or laptops."

Microsoft Office 365 Business Premium offers a full range of web-based services and access to all the familiar apps such as Word, Excel and PowerPoint as well Bookings, an online appointment scheduling service.

Microsoft Bookings improves the booking experience for both businesses and their clients. It enables users to easily set up an appointment scheduling app and customise a web-based booking page that customers can access at their convenience.

Another important time- and cost-saving feature of Office 365 Business Premium is Skype for Business Online which connect employees and teams for meetings and conversations basically anytime and from virtually anywhere. It provides instant messaging, audio and video calling, rich online meetings, and extensive web conferencing capabilities.

Lastly, Microsoft Office 365 is a security-hardened service, it uses a defence-in-depth approach to physical, logical, and data layers of security features and operational best practices. In addition, Office 365 gives users enterprise-grade user and admin controls to further secure your environment.