Office 365 opens up a whole new world of opportunity

Office 365 and then what? A great deal of companies utilise Office 365 on its own to use their Office license in the cloud.

Icelandic Spektra shares their experience of how Office 365 opens up a whole new world of opportunity – not least building a business-critical solution for project management

Interview with Þór Haraldsson, CEO, Spektra, Iceland

What is the value of Office 365?

“The value of having Office 365 is that it is easy to implement and you can get up and running in a matter of minutes. Office 365 is updated much faster. You receive new features and updates every 2-3 months. Microsoft updates the version with new features, so a lot of new development is happening – faster than an on-premise solution. That is a great bonus. The other fact is that Office 365 completely integrates with everything that we are doing and using.”

What is the biggest advantage of Office 365?

“Microsoft is bringing us new developments much faster, and much quicker than ever before. We do not have to worry about downtime on the server-side, server updates or anything like that. Everything is basically up and running and works. You do not have to worry about hosting, the cost of hosting (price is set per user per month), or have to worry that your systems are going down.”

Why is there a growing interest for Office 365?

“The interest for Office 365 and for building atop of it is growing very fast at the moment. A lot of companies are moving to Office 365 because it is so nice and easy to get the Office-suite (Word, Excel, and everything) in the Cloud. But it is not only nice to have, getting SharePoint Online with Office 365 is opening up a whole new world of opportunity, a lot of new ways and solutions to build business-critical solutions on. A lot of smaller and medium size companies are also using Office 365, and they are now realising that they have a great tool in SharePoint Online for project, case and document management. For just a few years ago, it was too expensive for them if they had to build an on premise solution for project management. Now the cloud solves their problems.”

How do you build project or case management into Office 365?

A standard solutions like WorkPoint 365 is adding much value to Office 365. WorkPoint 365 fills some of the gaps that SharePoint Online has out of the box. It delivers a complete solution to the task of managing projects, cases and tender processes. As CEO, I have a much, much better overview with WorkPoint 365 as a project management tool of everything that is going on concerning each project at Spektra. I do not have to be updated about statuses of projects by the employees themselves. I can see the time registration, the costs, and the total status. I know if one part are getting close to be done, or it exceeds any parameters, so it has really given me a nice overview. Another advantage is how easily WorkPoint 365 is adapted to fit the individual needs of a company.”

But what about security in the Cloud?

“The big question at the moment is if you are o.k. with hosting your data somewhere other than in your own environment. If you are fine with that, the Cloud is definitely a good solution. If you want to be able to touch the servers that you have data on to know where they actually are, in what room, or were they are placed, you might have a false sense of security in a world where everything is going extremely fast, and were updates are coming within weeks rather than years. I think everything is moving into the Cloud – it is just a matter of time.”

Links:

Case story: Office 365 afforded a grip on projects – Read more
Office 365 Trust Center – Read more

WorkPoint 365: Completing SharePoint Online

WorkPoint 365 is a business-strategic Cloud solution for project, case and contacts management, taking full advantage of SharePoint Online, integrating with Office 365.