27 Jan Productivity boosting features of 365
Time is an essential commodity to businesses worldwide – wasting it can have derogatory effects on production and, in turn, the profit of the company. In recent years technology has evolved into a powerful ally in achieving effective time management – it is essential you use it wherever possible.
Microsoft 365 – A technical solution to achieving effective time management
Microsoft 365 is the tool of choice for many. Since its conception 365 has become the market leader in providing tools to assist us in our daily lives, both when working and in our free time. Microsoft’s range of tools has revolutionised the way we approach technology and has become a staple of our daily lives for almost 50 years. We will now take an in-depth look at a feature of 365 designed solely to increase productivity and improve time management.
Power Automate
In the past, it has been impossible to get Cloud services to work in unison with one another. Power Automate makes this possible; it gives you the power to create a workflow with a multi-step flow across a variety of applications.
One example is, by using Power Automate, it is possible to receive an automated text message to inform you when you have an email. By using it wherever possible, Power Automate saves copious amounts of time which are normally wasted on mundane tasks every day.
We will now take a look at an example in more detail to see where this feature could be beneficial to you and your business.
For example, a potential customer tweets your business account – it is essential to reply promptly, both to project a professional image of your organisation and to ensure that in the time it takes you to reply they don’t take their business elsewhere – a variety of reasons can make this impossible. This is where Power Automate comes in. By setting up a flow it follows the potential customer, sends them a reply, and will add their details to a spreadsheet that gets emailed over to you for approval, all automatically! In this circumstance the automation helps you to keep your company reputation at its peak by minimising the response time, so giving you more time to reply in person as necessary.
It is also possible with Power Automate for you to manage approvals on the go on your phone, by email, or on the web. Approvals work with data in over 100 services, including SharePoint, Microsoft 365, and Twitter.
Power Automate takes the strain of monotonous time-consuming tasks out of your hands. It also avoids you having to pay staff for doing tasks that are beneath their skill set, allowing them to use their time as productively as possible.
How does Power Automate work
The concept of business process automation is working from an initial trigger action, be that prescheduled or because of a prior human action. A series of pre-scripted steps will follow. To ensure you have some control you can define your own parameters from which the automation will act.
As mentioned earlier, using Power Automate wherever possible is essential to guarantee that you achieve the maximum possible from the limited hours within your normal workday. Staff can spend time doing the jobs they are paid to do as opposed to spending valuable time ‘filling in the gaps’.
Want to guarantee effective time management within your business?
Intrigued as to other benefits automation can achieve?
How can we help?
Here at VaraTech, we offer a broad range of IT support and consultancy services that aim to help small businesses extract maximum value from their IT. From proactive network monitoring/maintenance and hardware leasing to Cloud services, VoIP telephony and much more, we help our clients identify and roll-out the best-fit solutions for their businesses.
We’re cloud computing experts! We can help your business leverage the potential of some of the most empowering Cloud services, such as Microsoft 365. Why not get in touch today, to discover how the flexibility, scalability cost-efficiency, convenience and security of Cloud services can help your business realise its potential.