Microsoft 365

<div>We use Microsoft 365 as our office suite of choice. It is the default option for any documentation, presentations or spreadsheets needed to conduct business.</div><div>

</div><div>We use it to connect with our teams around the world, sharing knowledge, intellectual property and reference work.</div><div>

</div><div>It's fundamental to our ability to operate as a consulting entity.</div>

• It's use unlocks significant revenue opportunities as we're able to pull together proposals leveraging content from around the world
• It expedites our time to market as we're able to easily leverage other work as it's the defacto file format standard
• The addition of GenAI functionality has done little to impact our ROI

Google Workspace and Notion

Notion, Microsoft Visual Studio Code, Microsoft Teams

Communication and office tools, like I would assume many others. Teamwork activities and knowledge management are also important. The need to create documents with Word, PPT, XLS, and be able to share them quickly for easy view or edit access, and collaborative work all around. Broadcasting through teams, news, SharePoint, and other tools effectively summarizes the use.

• Quick collaboration is a game-changer. Now getting a peer review and not losing versions is a breeze, making KM easier and more efficient.
• Analytics with Excel for easy to mid, Power BI and Power Query for more complex. Having all these different tools and content to teach how to make the most of them enables people to focus on business value more quickly. And with the advent of LLMs, even more.
• Broadcasting is also more efficient, as it is specific to stakeholders who are merely users or provide minimal value in the creation process, but are crucial in the deployment. Being able to integrate a dashboard with a presentation, plus a document, all in a few clicks, is very efficient.
• It's not hard to create workflows where automations and processes can be deployed from creation to collaboration to broadcast.

Google Sheets, Google Slides, Google Surveys and Apache OpenOffice

monday.com, DaVinci Resolve, xAI Grok, ChatGPT, Python IDLE

• Easy to schedule conversations; keep paper trails; and generally organize tasks and meetings.
• Can't communicate or share with vendors who do not subscribe to office 365.
• Easy to share files, make edits and communicate with other 365 users.
• There are free vendors out there -- but the larger the organization, the more difficult that becomes to implement consistently.

Apple iCloud, Dropbox, Google Drive and Slack

Adobe Illustrator CC, Google Drive, Apple iCloud, Kronos Workforce Central

We use 365 primarily for Outlook—we don't use the Exchange server, but we do use IMAP, so this serves our purpose perfectly. We also use Word for some minor invoicing and Excel for our pricelists. Sometimes, we will use Publisher, so we are glad we still have the option to use it.

• We have a lot of nonprofit users, so they have a good ROI.
• I like the constant updates without having to purchase the software repeatedly.
• I used to purchase each Office (insert year here) often, so the software was up to date and had the newest options and connectors. I think my return on investment would have been much better if Microsoft had updated those versions to keep them current; after all, we did pay for them.
• Microsoft 365's offering a monthly fee or a discount for a year helps, and you can look at it as a free backup if you have everything set to back up to One Drive. (Cloud-based document filing you can access anywhere ( with an internet connection)—you Can't beat that!)

Adobe Acrobat, Adobe PhotoShop, GoTo Resolve

This is our main business software for documents and emails. We also use sharepoint and onedrive for collaboration. I'm not sure that Office 365 actually solves any business "problems". We use it simply because we have been a Windows shop for a couple of decades, and this is the office suite that is made by the same company, so compatibility is good. We have about 100 users worldwide, in-office and remote, and we no longer allow users to save docs on their local systems, so one drive is handy for that.

• Negative - when your systems are flapping and losing data, I have to field a hundred calls about it, and the only answer I can give is "Microsoft outage". Time is money, so every minute I have to spend covering for you is a minute of my life I will never get back.
• I guess online Exchange is easier to deal with than on-prem running on a physical server
• ROI is above my pay grade

ArcGIS, Microsoft SQL Server, Microsoft Visual Studio Code