Last week, we showed you three powerful Microsoft 365 apps that many businesses haven’t discovered yet. Bookings, Whiteboard, and Planner are already a part of your Microsoft 365 license, and they can drive incredible improvements to your workflow and processes.
If you appreciated that post, we have good news: this week, we’re back with more. Check out three MORE lesser-known apps you already have access to in Microsoft 365!
Power Automate
Are you an efficiency freak who’s always looking for ways to speed up your work? Or have you ever noticed that your job requires you to repeat a series of tasks many times a day? If so, Power Automate (previously called Microsoft Flow) could save you some serious time and effort.
Power Automate is an automation tool that you can use to create sequences of tasks or steps. It’s a take on macros, but it’s more powerful because it can integrate with multiple Microsoft 365 apps.
Here’s an example: do you frequently make updates to a document, save the document, and then create an email or Teams message indicating the step you’ve completed or the task you’ve started? Power Automate can be configured to do most of that communicating automatically.
Power Automate workflows can get very complex, but they can also be pretty simple. To get an idea of how Power Automate can eliminate manual work, check out these 5 Power Automate examples.
Power Apps
Power Apps is a no-code app building tool within Microsoft 365. It’s like Power Automate’s grown-up sibling, a more robust, more capable tool for building simple apps or complex workflows.
This one won’t be for everybody: if Power Automate sounded overwhelming, then Power Apps is going to be even more so. But no-code is still much, much simpler than traditional app building. If you or someone on your team has the right set of abilities, it doesn’t take much training to get started with Power Apps.
And, of course, because it’s part of Microsoft 365, Power Apps integrates well with other Microsoft 365 apps. You can even pull in automations you built in Power Automate as the foundation for your Power Apps workflows.
If all you need is a fairly simple app and it doesn’t yet exist, you can likely build it yourself in Power Apps rather than contract with a software or app developer. That’s the power of Power Apps.
SharePoint
SharePoint is more well-known than the first two apps in this post, but it’s still not on the radar for most small business leaders. And that’s a shame, because it’s a really powerful tool.
Companies of a certain size often maintain their own private intranet site or internal wiki— some method of sharing information across the organization in a stable, semi-permanent way. Doing this “from scratch” requires a significant resource outlay and might seem out of reach for your business.
That’s where SharePoint comes in.
SharePoint lets you build out this kind of intranet presence for your business. It’s a highly customizable environment, too, so it can take on the visual aesthetic of your business. It won’t just look like another office app.
With SharePoint, many businesses can do this without the need of an external developer. And the integration with OneDrive and other Microsoft 365 products is superb, too.
Looking for More on Microsoft 365? We Can Help!
Looking to get more out of your Microsoft 365 license? Or are you ready to make the switch to Microsoft 365? Blue Ridge Technology is your Asheville partner for Microsoft 365 migration and integration. Reach out today to see what we can do for you!