On September 22, Microsoft announced its release of the new Office 2016 suite. This familiar productivity package includes the apps you already know and love, including Excel, Outlook, Powerpoint, Word, and Access, as well as a few others, each one tweaked and updated to bring your small or medium-sized business into the future of computing. However, there are a few steps that business owners and their IT teams may need to take to ensure their systems are up to task.

Among other brand new features, Office 2016 includes co-authoring, allowing multiple users to collaborate on and edit a document at once; simplified sharing of documents and spreadsheets for those in your immediate area; brand new chart types for Word, Excel, and PowerPoint; and even new themes to choose from. Overall, Office 2016 takes a heavy focus on collaboration and makes it easy for members of a team to share and work on documents in real-time.

It goes without saying that such advanced features would provide benefits to an office of any size, allowing them to complete their work in a faster, more efficient manner. Here are a few things you can do to ensure your office is ready for Office 2016:

 

• Become familiar with the new module for deploying updates. The Office 2016 update for Office 365 includes a brand new updates manager, reducing the frequency of updates and pushing them through more efficiently. However, this update is more geared toward larger businesses, while smaller groups will still stick with monthly updates. You should be receiving an email (if you haven’t already) that discusses the update process and any changes you might incur.

• Ensure your network is in good shape. To take advantage of all these great collaborative features, you’ll need a solid network on which to run the Office suite and each user should be easily able to connect. If you’d like to run a diagnostic test, be sure to get in touch with your IT team to learn about the next step.

• Perform a backup across your network–just in case. While the update for Office 2016 promises to be a quick and easy one, stranger things have happened while updating an office’s systems. You’ll want to perform a full backup on all machines just to make sure your information is protected and doesn’t get lost in the transition.

The new Office 2016 update promises to offer some major benefits for all businesses who use it. If you’d like to learn more about using the Office suite on your business network, contact Firewall Computer Services today. Give us a call at (407) 637-3430 today to schedule your free consultation.