No-Brainer for Small Businesses

With all the excitement around the beta of Office 365, we asked a few of our customers to share their thoughts and experiences thus far on using the Office 365 beta. You can read more guest posts like this one here.

By David M. Kroenke, Textbook Author

I’ve been an independent textbook author since 1974, mostly writing college-level texts on the use of technology in business. I’m based in Seattle and Whidbey Island, but I work with a team of editors and designers all over the United States. We produce two or three new editions of information systems textbooks a year.

Textbook publishing is a complex, detail-oriented process with the potential for a zillion errors to creep in. It’s also time-critical. We can only publish in late December or early January. Our team relies on emails and file servers to share chapters, but everyone knows the problems with that: people don’t read their emails, or they don’t get an attachment, or you can’t identify the latest document version on the server, or you want the version that is two versions before the current one.

As soon as I heard about Office 365, I wrote everyone I know at Microsoft to get into the beta program. After using it a few days, realizing how productive it made me, I thought, “This is big-time; it’s going to blow the barn doors off the market.” So, I stopped working on my then-current textbook and Don Nilson and I started writing a book for business professionals about using Office 365. (Titled Office 365 in Business, to be published by Wiley.)

Office 365 makes it easier than ever to work with people all over the country. If I want to show a diagram or document to our team, I use Lync Online to share it using video conferencing. It’s like we’re sitting together in the same room—actually it’s better because we can save our whiteboard, something we can’t do face-to-face. The saved whiteboards become de facto minutes and a by-product of the meeting that no one has to write.

I’m even more fanatical about Microsoft SharePoint Online, part of the Office 365 suite. We use it to track documents, screenshots, tasks, and calendars. Version control is the biggest benefit for a small business like mine. The textbook production process generates dozens of drafts and hundreds of figures and screenshots. With SharePoint Online, we can keep all that material straight. With Office 365 version control, we never pick up the wrong version. We use alerts, too.

Office 365 reduces the hassle of working between two offices. I don’t store anything on my local computer anymore—it’s all on my team site. I never have to remember which computer I put particular files on. No more carting thumb drives back and forth, nor worrying about data loss if I drop my computer somewhere.

No small business knows how to run a server, nor do they want to. They want to run their business. What happens if somebody pushes the floor buffer into your server? You’ve lost your data. No small business can afford that. With Office 365, Microsoft hosts everything, and I no longer worry about reliability, security, or natural disasters. If Microsoft is down for a period of time, it pays you for your lost time. I have four servers sitting in a corner of my office that I haven’t turned on in months, nor do I want to.

The best part is, I’m no longer working as an unpaid server administrator. I’m a writer of technology textbooks, which is what I want to be. Eventually, I could figure it out, but I never wanted to apply the latest service pack to Windows Server, or remember to upgrade SQL Server first—or is it the other way around? Somebody does want to do that; let him or her do it for us in a Microsoft data center. And, yeah, I’m saving money on servers and software, too. Office 365 is a no-brainer.

Anyone need a server? Or four?

To learn more about David and his book, Office 365 in business, check out his website (build simply with SharePoint Online) or meet him in person on July 27!