Today’s workforce is everywhere at once, making collaboration more crucial than ever before. The way we work has evolved and businesses need to follow suit, ensuring collaborative environments are easily available and enable everyone to work together as a team.
Real-time communication apps such as MS Teams and Slack have become more popular in recent times, it is hard to believe email is still the primary source of business communication. With Microsoft Outlook dominating the space, your business will enable everyone within the organisation to have access to the same information, and communicate effectively with those outside your company.
What is MS Outlook?
Microsoft Outlook is a multi-faceted business and personal email management application. As an independent email application, Outlook allows you to switch between different accounts more easily, as well as work with a variety of other business and productivity applications. You may use Microsoft Outlook, for example, to manage calendar events, contacts, tasks, and notes across multiple devices.Microsoft Outlook features
MS Outlook’s versatility is why it is so popular with businesses. It ensures your employees and colleagues can get the most from their workday, with features and functions that enable seamless workflow and heightened productivity: Sending emails: Outlook is primarily an email service. You can send, receive, forward, and reply to emails using it. You can delay delivery of specific emails that need to be sent at a specific time, and the Quick Parts function enables users to copy text from an email and insert it into other messages. Email attachments: You can save attachments as favourites in Outlook so that you can easily access them later. If you mention an attachment in the body of your email but forget to attach a file before sending, Outlook will remind you to include the attachment. With Office integration, you can attach documents directly from Microsoft OneDrive. Alerts function: You can be notified when an incoming message matches certain criteria. This alert will appear over any other application you are working on, ensuring that you do not miss a critical message. Seamless organisation: The Cleanup Conversation tool searches for emails that are redundant in a conversation, folder, or folder with all its subfolders, then deletes (by default) or moves them to another folder. This prevents your mailbox from being inundated with multiple copies of the same message. Outlook also allows you to categorise your emails by project or by day. Calendar: Keeping track of appointments, meetings, and other events is a snap with Outlook’s calendar. You can use the calendar as a to-do list to keep track of both personal and professional commitments, coordinate calendars, and track time spent on projects. Schedule meetings: You can create a calendar entry with the same details every week or month to set up a recurring meeting using Outlook. You can also send an email to someone to set up a meeting at a specific time and place. Contacts: Keep track of all of your clients’ contact information by using the address book. With this function, you can store the name and contact information of your contacts, and search for them easily. Using @ and another user’s name will add the user’s email address to an email list, highlight the user’s mention, and notify the user. Assign tasks: You can use this feature to create, manage, and organise tasks. On the calendar, you can see all the tasks you assigned to other people, as well as the deadlines for those tasks. This enables you to keep track of a wide range of tasks, people, and deadlines. Reminders: You can create reminders, email notifications, or recurring jobs with Outlook. When a reminder is overdue, you’ll receive an email alert letting you know it’s time to get busy. In this way, you will never forget an important job. Accessibility: Keyboard shortcuts makes it easy to access all the features and functions of Outlook, making it easier to be productive
MS Outlook integration with MS365
Microsoft 365 customers can integrate Outlook email with other business applications like Microsoft Word, Excel, PowerPoint, SharePoint, and more. This allows you to sync your Outlook calendar, emails, and contacts with your MS365 account, offering the ability to share documents and calendars with other people in your company. Integration with OneDrive means your files are stored in the cloud, so they are accessible anywhere at any time, even if you don’t have access to your work device. With so many businesses utilising Microsoft Teams as their main communication hub, being able to integrate with Outlook is a bonus, by taking advantage of Teams’ superior communication features while managing schedules, contacts, and emails via Outlook.Benefits of using MS Outlook for your business
Any organisation can become more effective by being able to create, collaborate, and communicate seamlessly. Efficiency is vitally important for business and MS Outlook makes all the difference:- You can ensure security best practices are enabled and configure Outlook to block external content, such as web bugs or downloaded images from unknown sites or contacts, as well as junk mail filtering.
- You can quickly locate any email, client, or reminder using the search function.
- Outlook is accessible and can be installed as an app on Android devices, Mac computers, Linux machines, and other devices.
- You can link other independent applications, such as Skype or Teams, to assist with tasks like calendar appointments or reminders.
