The Benefits of Microsoft Office 365 OneDrive for Business Collaboration

The big data business world requires you to handle many files on a regular basis, collaborate with your colleagues and manage digital assets. Your organization’s storage needs increase every year, but you may not currently use a centralized system. You have five versions of the same file for your team documents, you saved your work on your laptop and forgot it at home, and you can’t figure out where your boss stored necessary template files. In short, your office lacks a cohesive data storage strategy, and you’re the one paying the productivity price for it. The benefits of Microsoft Office 365 OneDrive makes it easy to work with your files and collaborate with coworkers. You spend less time looking through workstation hard drives, network storage locations and your personal devices to find urgently needed files. Instead, your business uses a single cloud-based storage solution to streamline your workflow and introduce more collaboration opportunities. Here are a few ways OneDrive for Business excels in the workplace.

Benefits of Microsoft Office 365 OneDrive

Anytime, Anywhere Access to Files

One of the benefits of Microsoft Office 365 OneDrive for Business is that it operates within the cloud, so you don’t have to log in from a particular workstation or device to get access to your files. You also don’t need to be physically in the office or logged into your work network, unless the IT department specifically configured OneDrive with this deployment option. Your telecommuting days or business trips become more productive when you aren’t struggling with insufficient remote access to work.

Collaborative Office Document Editing

You get through a project much faster when your team all views the same document version. OneDrive for Business integrates with Word, Excel and other applications for streamlined collaboration. You see changes to the document in real-time through the co-authoring feature, as well as a color indicator displaying where your coworkers made changes. You also stop the cycle of requesting revisions, updates and other changes through email, which gets frustrating when juggling multiple versions of a file. OneDrive improves your data quality by giving access to a single centralized document. Version control lets you restore the file back to a previous state, which helps when your team doesn’t agree on the changes or someone accidentally deletes critical information.

User-Friendly Interface

You also don’t have a complicated or hard-to-use interface with OneDrive. It’s almost identical to the personal version of OneDrive, so you don’t have much of a learning curve if you already used that product. Otherwise, the UI design offers intuitive controls for anyone familiar with Windows file manager. Your folder and file list allows you to easily look through your owned and shared documents.

Document Sharing

OneDrive’s robust document sharing features provide another key business collaboration benefit. You have several ways to share files with your organization and with external users. Link sharing creates a direct link to the document, which allows internal or external users to access the information. You can set the document to require a sign-in, which limits sharing to your internal organization accounts only. If you need to make an external link accessible to an external contributor, but you don’t want to keep that link active forever, the expiration date feature automatically disables the link at a specific time. Your documents can be read-only, which prevents any changes, or you can allow the viewer to make edits. Your other sharing option works via a right-click context menu on your files or folders. You define the coworkers authorized to view the document, set edit or read-only permissions and decide whether you want to send a message with the invitation. You can add external users to the document through their email addresses. This sharing option works well when you need to share a document with people scattered through your organization.

Local File Synchronization

OneDrive allows you to work with your files from anywhere as long as you have an Internet connection, but what if you end up in no signal land? The sync client saves a local copy of your files or folders to your computer, so you have access to important documents offline. Once you reconnect to the Internet, your changes get uploaded to the cloud, and any new additions get downloaded to your computer.

Security

Your collaboration efforts may involve sensitive data, which often gets put at risk through inadvertent sharing, poor data management practices and other problems. OneDrive for Business incorporates several security features to limit the risk from remote connections and workplace collaboration. Encryption at a disk and file level keeps data transmission secure. Network administrations control user access to files, so you only have access to the documents relevant to your position. Additionally, external file sharing or non-domain joined devices may be blocked from accessing files. OneDrive for Business goes beyond basic cloud storage with its collaboration tools and user-friendly interface. You don’t need to jump through hoops to work on documents with the rest of your team, send files to individuals throughout your organization or remotely access required files when you’re on the road. The application’s deep integration with the rest of Office 365 is just one of the other benefits of Microsoft Office 365 OneDrive.

Is your company fully capitalizing on its Office 365 investment through critical business applications like OneDrive? Or need help migrating your company data to Office 365?

Let our team of cloud consultants execute your cloud strategy with AgileCover cloud managed services or AgileAscend Office 365 migration services today.