With Office Insider, subscribers have the privilege of viewing and testing new Office 365 features before other users. This insider feature targets tech-savvy business owners who want to get ahead of the competition and take their software game to the next level.

Early Access

Subscribing to Office Insider gives you access to new innovations, security updates, and bug fixes months before they are released to the public. This insider feature is available in two levels: the fast ring where updates are rolled out more frequently, but come with a few bugs, and the slow ring where updates are released slower, but come with little to no software bugs.

What’s new for Office Insiders?

1. 1. Ideas in Excel
      Ideas is a bolt-shaped icon at the top right corner of the screen that helps you understand your data through high-level summaries, trends, and patterns. It will analyze your data and create attractive visuals about it in the task pane.
   2. Animated 3D graphics
      Animated 3D graphics like beating hearts, orbiting planets, and rampaging T-rex are now available on Powerpoint. You can insert 3D models from the internet and animate them with the Runner badge to spice up your PowerPoint slides.
   3. New proofreading tools
      Editor can now mark issues on spelling, grammar, and style with red, blue, and gold underlines. It provides suggestions to improve your writing in the Editor pane, which even explains the suggestions to better help you pick the best one.
   4. New look for the ribbon icons
      Ribbon icons now have crisp, clean lines, are visually optimized for all devices, and automatically updated.
   5. Coming Soon
      Outlook occasionally releases dramatic new features and for some people, it can be a little bit overwhelming. The Coming Soon feature allows you to have a window of time to try out new features before they become permanent.

Competitive Advantage

By being an Office 365 Insider, you can test the waters and get acquainted with the features way ahead of your competition.

Reserving a meeting room can be a lot easier now through Outlook. Misspelled search terms are now automatically managed by Outlook. Also, with the new supercharged VLOOKUP, HLOOKUP, and MATCH functions, you can easily find answers to your queries.

Feedback

Subscribing to the Insider program also allows you to give your feedback directly to the Microsoft product team. It will help you to accustom yourself with the features earlier, and you’ll contribute to making Office 365 better for other users worldwide. You’ll be a part of the ongoing process of Office improvement.

Office Insider can open up your company to a wide variety of productivity-boosting features. The only question you have to ask yourself now is: Do I want to be at the cutting edge of tech innovations?

Contact us today to find out how you can get on the inside and know the latest Office updates.

The post Reasons to become an Office Insider appeared first on Complete Technology Resources, Inc..

Both SharePoint and OneDrive help business owners manage and share data. But selecting the best platform can be difficult and give anyone a big headache. For instant relief, here’s a quick reference to help you choose wisely.

Looking for a secure platform to manage your files? Where do you go for help? Should you choose SharePoint or settle for OneDrive instead? If any of those terms sound Greek to you, don’t worry. You don’t need a degree in computer science to figure it out. This article will give you the lowdown on what to expect from these services.

Both SharePoint and OneDrive are cloud-based services from Microsoft that allow you to store, share, and sync files across different devices. SharePoint was released in 2001 and reportedly has over 190 million users. OneDrive, on the other hand, was launched in 2007 and has more than 250 million users.

SharePoint is marketed mainly as a document management and storage system, but it can be configured to do much more than that. OneDrive, which was previously known as SkyDrive and Windows Live Folders, is part of the Office suite of online services.

What the two have in common
For starters, both platforms make use of Office 365 to help companies organize information and share this with others. To keep things secure, documents go to a cloud drive, so employees can easily track changes in a single file that is stored in one central location. One of the main reasons these platforms are so popular is because users can add comments and notes using real-time collaboration. Since data can be synchronized and is readily available, everyone sees the most up-to-date information regardless of how they view the document.

With OneDrive, it’s personal
OneDrive makes use of a SharePoint backdrop to work. This connects the two programs. The difference is that OneDrive is made for an individual, and the user remains in control even if the file is shared to different people. This means multiple teams can collaborate simultaneously as long as the original owner shares the document via a secure link. That person determines who can edit and view the file.

There’s more to SharePoint
With SharePoint, employees throughout the company can view and edit the stored file. Changes are tracked and higher-ups will know who is working on the document. This is ideal for human resource surveys or updates that need the attention of other team members.

With SharePoint and OneDrive, businesses can improve the way they work. If you want to learn how online document sharing programs can improve your company’s visibility and productivity, get in touch with us now. We’re here for you.

The post Storage showdown: OneDrive vs SharePoint appeared first on Complete Technology Resources, Inc..

Installing software that immediately boosts employee efficiency is any small- or medium-sized business owner’s dream. With Office 365’s dashboard, that’s exactly what you’re getting. And best of all, it’s directly integrated with your existing productivity suite. Read on to learn more.

What is MyAnalytics?

MyAnalytics apply machine learning technology to your employees’ Office 365 data. By utilizing extremely powerful computing processes to analyze huge blocks of information, MyAnalytics can uncover trends and correlations that may be too complex for human discovery.

Every day, Office 365 users create several thousand new data points across Microsoft’s productivity suite, and there’s a lot of potential to rearrange meetings, project goals, and employee tasks to increase efficiency.

The most obvious improvement is with Outlook calendar. MyAnalytics tracks how much time you’re spending with each person in your office as well as the time you’re investing in specific projects. After sufficient information has been gathered, your Office 365 dashboard will begin coaching you on how to organize meetings and project goals based on your habits and past successes.

How can it improve your office?

Have you ever worked on a huge project that required multiple contributors? Did you all meet regularly to update each other? Users who add contacts — from both inside the company and out — and projects to MyAnalytics get reminders to stay in touch with co-workers most vital to project completion.

Every metric tracked by MyAnalytics can be shared with your team to make sure everyone is on the same page. So MyAnalytics is more than just a motivational tool, because sharing these metrics allows your team to identify bottlenecks and trends to smoothen the workflow process.

Response time is another key metric your employees are probably only vaguely aware of. MyAnalytics calculates average email response times — both from you and from contacts — to identify what time of day you’re best at communicating, and how you can adapt your schedule to get more work done in the same amount of time.

Privacy concerns

One of the greatest things about MyAnalytics is that it doesn’t introduce any new privacy concerns for business owners. All the data it uses to create customized coaching and advice is publicly available to everyone at your business — via calendar appointments, email content, and message timestamps. The only difference is that Microsoft is lending you the previously prohibitive computing power to sift through all of it.

Availability

This wonderful new tool comes with any Enterprise E5 plan, but can also be added on to E1 and E3 Enterprise plans for just a few dollars per month.

Increasing employee productivity is never as clear cut as it is with MyAnalytics. Install a solution, follow its advice, and start brainstorming about what to do with all your extra time. We’ve got plenty of other great solutions for streamlining your business processes — call us today to find out!

The post MyAnalytics: O365’s productivity coach appeared first on Complete Technology Resources, Inc..