Why aiio and Office 365 belong together

No one can avoid Microsoft 365!

Microsoft 365 and Office 365 (formerly just Office 365) is THE office software subscription from Microsoft Office. Microsoft developed Office 365 as a further development of Microsoft Exchange email and the Office Suite, with which many employees are already familiar. For an incredible number of office workers, Microsoft Office has been practically the 'lowest common denominator' of document-based office communication for decades. With Office 365, these services have been moved to the reliable Microsoft Cloud, equipped with additional functions, subscription-based, and combined with other productivity tools such as Teams and SharePoint, and enriched with digitization aids such as Power Automate.

At the same time – not only but also – Corona has accelerated the age of digitization. More and more processes, such as applications, submitting vacation requests, or the creation and filing of personnel files, are increasingly being handled exclusively digitally. Of course, shifting activities to home or mobile offices also doesn't work practically with analog paper files.

Given the high market penetration of Microsoft 365 (e.g., compared to Google's competitive offering Google Workspace), Microsoft 365 is becoming a key 'digitization hub' for many companies. The digitization of processes should help to shorten action and reaction times in everyday life; within and between companies. Digitization should enable modern work concepts; location-independent work is just one facet.

Turn those affected into participants!

If digitization should not just consist of simply copying manual processes and digitally 'sprucing them up' (no, replacing a paper form with a PDF download is not digitization, but at best 'electrification'), but of reviewing and optimizing them, these must be known and described, visible and open for discussion. And this describing and discussing of processes and structures should include those who live with the processes every day. Turn those affected into actors! If processes described in this way, involving the 'knowledge of the many,' are digitized, this is much more likely to lead to lived processes than process design from an ivory tower. Process diagrams are no longer just dead documents, but become an important basis for digitization goals.

It is therefore obvious to integrate process management into this daily working environment. That's why we integrated aiio into Office 365. Users can access aiio via Microsoft Teams – the 'collaboration center' of Office 365 – and edit content together. Documents that are created or used in this context are stored in the SharePoint Online of your own Office 365 tenant; so no data leaves your own 'digital office'. A separate user administration is also not necessary; aiio uses the user administration of Office 365.

aiio is where its users are. Always just one click away from the current task.