Why aiio and Office 365 belong together

No one can get around Microsoft 365!

Microsoft 365 and Office 365 (formerly just Office 365) is THE Microsoft Office software subscription. Microsoft created Office 365 as an evolution 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 virtually the "lowest common denominator" of document-based office communications 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 digitalization. More and more processes, such as job applications, submitting a vacation request or filing personnel files, are increasingly being carried out exclusively digitally. Of course, shifting activities to the home or mobile office does not work practically with analog hand files either.

In view of the high market penetration of Microsoft 365 (e.g., in comparison with the competitor offering Google Workspace from Google), Microsoft 365 is thus becoming a very important "digitization hub" for many companies. The digitization of processes should help to shorten action and reaction times in everyday life, both within and between companies. Digitization should enable modern work concepts; location-independent working is just one facet of this.

Turning those affected into participants!

But if digitization is to consist not only of simply copying manual processes and "prettifying" them digitally (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 discussable. And this description and discussion of processes and structures should involve those who live with the processes on a daily basis. Turning those affected into actors! If processes described in this way are digitized with the involvement of the "knowledge of the many", this is much more likely to lead to lived processes than process design from the ivory tower. Process diagrams are no longer a paper corpse, but become an important basis for digitization goals.

So the obvious thing to do is to integrate process management into this daily working environment. That's why we've integrated aiio into Office 365. Users can access aiio via Microsoft Teams - the "collaboration hub" of Office 365 - and edit content together. Documents created or used in this context are stored in the SharePoint Online of the user's own Office 365 tenant; this way, no data leaves the user's own "digital office". There is also no need for separate user management; aiio uses the user management of Office 365.

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