Does your organisation create presentations, reports, brochures, training materials or even newsletters? Do you, your colleagues or co-workers struggle to read important PDF documents on your smartphone? Do you wish there was an easy way to gather all this information together and make it instantly accessible to everyone inside your company – or outside if you’re creating marketing materials?

Microsoft Sway is a new addition to the Office 365 for Business suite of apps. Whatever you’re assembling content for, Sway has a way to make it fast and easy. Everything you create in Sway lives in the cloud through your 365 account, so it’s searchable and accessible whenever it’s needed.

There are versions for business and personal users, with both working in much the same way apart from a few strategic differences:

Sway For Business

1. Organisation Privacy – Sways (Microsoft’s name for documents created with Sway) are, by default, private to your organisation. Permissions are granted to access documents in a similar way to general Office 365 permissions. Sharing with people outside your organisation requires a conscious change to the sharing setting.
2. Social network sharing is even more intentional, with social sharing buttons removed from top level menus. To share across social networks, the sharing setting on the document has to be changed, then a link copy/pasted into the social platform.
3.  Admin Control – You can control who has access to Sway, turn off the service altogether or disable social sharing.

Ways To Use Sway

Microsoft Sway offers new versatility and functionality to business communication in a number of ways. Whatever you create with Sway behaves responsively across all devices. Some examples of the kind of materials that are ideally suited to Sway include:

• Reports
• Presentations
• Newsletters
• Training Materials
• In-House News or Updates
• Events
• Marketing Materials/Campaigns
• Team Collaborations
• Blogs

Benefits and Ease of Use

• Communication – Sway maximises the versatility of Windows 10. Presentations or reports are equally accessible on large-screen desktops or small-screen mobile devices
• Creation – You don’t need to be sitting at a desk to put together a report. Creating and sharing meaningful documents on mobiles or tablets makes sharing information much easier.
• Web-based canvas – meaning you can pull in information from diverse sources, whether internal to the organisation or those sourced from the web (including movie or video clips). You could also incorporate original images shot on the fly with a mobile or tablet camera.
• Drag text directly from Word, simplifies using already-written information in reports, presentations or training materials. Examples could include charts or graphs.

Here’s a quick YouTube video on how one organisation creates a newsletter. It demonstrates many of Sway’s features that translate into numerous other uses.

If you’d like more info on how you can incorporate Sway into your business, get in touch with us. We’re happy to talk about your particular needs and how streamlining your IT actually streamlines your entire business.

For more information on Office 365 please visit Office 365