It is Saturday mid-morning. I’m headed out of town and I’m typing this on the go. I started this article yesterday at the office and unlike in the not too distant past where documents remained on the device in which they were saved, I’m now enabled to draft it on Microsoft Word, save it on Microsoft One Drive, access it from anywhere and on a different gadget and continue working on it. All thanks to Office 365. If it comes to that, I can walk into a cyber or borrow a neighbor’s laptop and continue working on documents that I’ll have saved on cloud. All this without the documents, presentations, spreadsheets and whatever else I may have been working on losing fidelity.
Productivity and mobility go hand in hand. In my case for example, I’m only ever in the office for a few hours of the day. My work involves a lot of meetings and events and I often find myself having to work from hotel lobbies, office receptions and sometimes even from the back of a taxi. With Office 365 on mobile, tablet, desktop and cloud, my work is always at my fingertips. Designed to work seamlessly across all devices be they desktops, phones, tablets and Mac, Office 365 s is what productivity is all about. What this means at the end of the day is that I rarely ever miss a deadline – at least not for a reason like lack of access to my work. This also means that I never need to carry work home at the end of the day.
I now have my good old and trusted Office apps across different devices and more importantly, I can sync my work on the devices and access them from anywhere. You know when a day ends and you’re tired but happy that you’ve been very productive at the office or at your place of operation? The satisfaction of a job well done will fire you up for the next days and the next weeks and months. In the end, productivity becomes a habit and the result of it is an organized work life with high achievements and less stress. Productivity is what Microsoft is enabling more and more of with Office 365 and other services.
Office 365’s payment model is subscription based. I’m on Office 365 Home and the monthly cost of this is USD.7.99. This can be installed in 5 gadgets so essentially one ‘piece’ costs just Kshs.800 a month.
For the full Microsoft experience, Office 365 comes with Office 2016. For every plan therefore, you get access to the 2016 versions of Word, PowerPoint, Excel and outlook. You also get free software updates with every new version of Microsoft Office. Payment plans are such as Office 365 for home, business, personal and University.
It is difficult to talk about Microsoft without a mention of Windows 10 as the two work superbly together. Windows 10 has since introduction been installed in over 300 million devices to date. If you haven’t already upgraded, you have until July 29th to get your free upgrade if you’re running a licenced version of Windows 7, 8 or 8.1.
Technology and gadgets have become constant companions to a majority of workers, both at home and in offices. There is barely an office or an office worker without PCs, laptops, tablets and phones. There is also barely an office or person without a Microsoft product or other in their lives. Before the coming of Office 365 which is highly optimized for full productivity, I’d either have been forced to pop by the office, carry work in flash disks and external hard disks, or forget about getting any work done until when next I’m in the office.