It’s hard to talk about Microsoft 365 and not mention the elephant in the room: Microsoft Teams. As remote work and the “new normal” continue to drive business decisions and the way we work, Microsoft Teams continues to be at the center of these collaboration conversations.

With all the attention on Teams, it’s easy to forget about the rest of Microsoft’s massive suite of tools that also contribute to making work life — and in some cases personal life — a little bit easier. To help you start, I’ve put together a list of four of the most effective Microsoft 365 tools I use on a daily or weekly basis that help me keep a handle on my day. There are many tools in the product suite that can help here, and even some new ones (Microsoft Lists).

The coronavirus crisis has illustrated the importance of mobility to business operations in nearly all sectors. Organizations have been forced to provide access to data and systems to far more employees working remotely than at any point in the past. During the crisis, organizations have sought to use mobile applications to create a competitive advantage.

Still, many organizations struggle with optimizing their mobile apps. Too often, mobile apps lack the visibility and controls to ensure that users have the best possible experience — and to ensure that the app is providing the business with as much value as possible.

Here are three areas that companies should be sure to tackle as they seek to get the most out of their mobile apps.

On its own, the baseline data captured on the Service Portal can be useful. The Portal logs can be found under Service Portal > Log Entries, and some basic reporting can be found under Service Portal > Usage Overview. While the baseline functionality is powerful, with a little configuration you can capture and display more usable information. This blog post will share some suggestions for how to glean more value from the baseline data.

Organizations use data analytics in a variety of ways: A health insurance company may want a way to identify emerging risk factors for disease in its patient populations; a nonprofit that connects bone marrow donors with people requiring transplants may look for ways to slash the time it takes to identify a likely match; a national retailer may seek to better understand the shopping preferences and habits of its target customers.

On the surface, at least, there’s little in common among these organizations and what they hope to achieve, but they each must excel at the same thing to succeed: They have to be adept at organizing and analyzing data, and they need a data strategy that ultimately works for them.

Today, we’re in the age of usage-based insurance. With modern automobile technology and new data-gathering methods, insurance companies can answer many questions about drivers: How fast does a person accelerate? How hard does he brake? What time of day does she typically drive? Using AI and data analytics, insurance carriers can correlate this data with the likelihood of a driver filing a claim, leading to personalized pricing, safe-driver discounts and more.

Until someone invents a crystal ball, business analytics tools are the best way to achieve a deeper understanding of business trends, such as emerging opportunities and changes in customer expectations and habits. The latest BA tools also enable organizations to unlock insights that otherwise would require hiring data scientists.