While it’s one of the best enterprise IT platforms around, there are a number of Office 365 limitations that can hold your business back.  In an age when technology is becoming more and more central to everything we do, having top quality productivity apps at your employees’ fingertips is essential.

The tools that are included with Office 365 are among the most cutting-edge productivity solutions available today, and do largely support this. Your employees can email, conference call and instant message each other without leaving their Word document window, making collaboration and communication as easy as working in the same room. There’s single-sign-on across multiple devices and a move to the cloud frees up your IT department‘s maintenance time because you don’t need servers (or, in fact, any IT infrastructure at all).

Nonetheless, there are some Office 365 limitations that you need to bear in mind if you’re considering a move to the platform.

The myth of one-size-fits-all

Business technology is rarely a ‘one-size fits all’. While Office 365 is a great platform to conduct your business on a daily basis, it can sometimes come up short in certain aspects. As well as this, it’s important that you’re constantly looking for ways to enhance your operations, to enable your employees to work faster and find solutions more in tune with what you need to accomplish. And while it’s great, there are other tools and add-ins out there that can overcome Office 365 limitations and make the platform work even harder and more efficiently for you.

To make the most of your investment, then, it’s a good idea to adapt Office 365 with the right enhancements so that the solution fits around your business better and handles your needs more effectively. We’re Microsoft experts and we have developed solutions that work together with Office 365 to help fit around the way your organisation works best.

Office 365 limitations

The promise of Office 365 is in the power of collaboration, enabling your business to operate at an optimal level. However, because your organisation is unique, the way you use your business tools means that sometimes technology needs to be adapted. Lightning Tools helps you fill in the gaps that exist between your processes and Office 365.

User experience and employee engagement should be central to what you want your technology to do. Adapting technology to how your employees work is paramount, and one of the biggest Office 365 limitations is that Microsoft simply doesn’t let you do this with the ‘out of the box’ version of the platform. Our add-ins are designed to overcome these Office 365 limitations. Easily accessible through your Office 365 portal, Outlook or through mobile whenever your users need better usability or further reach with their technology, they are built to fit around you.

Joining the Office 365 dots

Lightning Tools offers solutions that remove barriers to communication, automate manual processes and streamline your business’s current online tools in a way that’s cost effective and can grow with your business. So, how can we help your business overcome these Office 365 limitations?

• DeliverPoint Add-In

SharePoint Online’s out-of-the-box permissions management is okay, but there are limitations if you need a more precise overview of your entire SharePoint environment.

DeliverPoint for SharePoint is a free SharePoint Add-In which provides SharePoint Site Collection Administrators and Site Owners with a better understanding of who has what permissions to the SharePoint Site, Lists, and List/Library content. It allows your users to:

• Manage Permissions on folders files
• Schedule reports
• Discover Permissions and broken Permission Inheritance within lists or libraries
• Show how Permissions have been granted
• Create unique reports
• Find dead account detection

• Data Viewer Add-In (as Web Part)

Office 365 employs a variety of impressive tools and is a central point for all your data. However, sometimes you need to format your data in a certain way but to do that across Office 365 and SharePoint Online is a tedious and time consuming task.

The Data Viewer for SharePoint Online is an Office 365 app that allows you to connect internal and external data, such as internal SharePoint lists with an external source like Business Connectivity Services (BCS) or ODATA. The benefit, once you are connected, is that you can easily apply formatting and conditional formatting to your data using very simple configuration options.

• The Lightning Conductor

Office 365 and SharePoint is your central content hub where all your data and documents are stored and worked on. The problem is they are usually spread across various locations. Meaning important information can get isolated possibly overlooked.

The Lightning Conductor is an Office 365 add-in that allows you to aggregate SharePoint Content from SharePoint lists and libraries into one powerful view. The content can be aggregated across site collections easily and views built without any code. Some of the benefits to your business with this Add-In include:

• Increase productivity by allowing your users to find content in one place
• Highlight key data using conditional formatting
• Organise aggregated data using the multiple levels of grouping
• Display results in grid format or calendar views
• Save endless hours of writing XSLT or Display Templates

Don’t hold back

So, don’t let Office 365 limitations hold your business back. Take the great foundation that Microsoft provide and make it work even more powerfully and uniquely for your business. For more information on all our Office 365 and SharePoint add-ins as well as our other solutions, learn more here.

For more information on how we can help your business make the most of your Office 365 investment, get in contact today.