In many areas of life, familiarity breeds productivity. Knowing our neighborhood, we can take the most direct route to work. Understanding how to navigate the local library, we can use its resources more efficiently. Knowing how to bank online, we can pay our bills very quickly.

The same holds true for productivity software.  When we use the same collaboration and productivity tools every day, we become extremely efficient at getting our work done. One of the benefits of Microsoft Office 365 is that it takes the powerful Office tools most employees are already familiar with and delivers them through the cloud. What’s more, organizations can blend Office 365 in the cloud with their on-premises version of Office, giving them maximum flexibility as to how they work.

Because Office 365 tools are familiar, little time is wasted coming up to speed. Instead, employees are highly productive right from the start. They can simply continue to work the way they want to work.

Familiarity is one of the reasons why many organizations choose Office 365. Because most businesses already know how to use Office, they can move their productivity applications to the cloud without large training costs or losses in productivity.

Take the Salesian School of Hong Kong, which has 40 staff members and 320 students, all of whom depend on email messaging to stay in touch.  School officials wanted to give its teachers new communications capabilities without a large amount of ramp-up time. “We’ve been interested in exploring e-learning for some time, but the staff did not want to spend the time learning something new,” says Andy Li, a teacher at the school. “Office 365 is familiar to both teachers and students and will help move us forward.”

The familiarity of Office was also a plus for Travelers Haven. The company, which provides corporate and temporary housing solutions in all 50 cities in the United States, is implementing Office 365 as a way to improve efficiency and better coordinate with remote employees. Says Travelers Haven President Elia Wallen: “I didn’t bother looking at Google, because everyone who we hire knows the Windows operating system and Office. Why not stick with what we know if it performs?”

Did your organization stick with Office 365 because of its familiarity? In what ways has familiarity been a benefit? Please share your experience.