Much has been said about the Nokia Lumia and its entertainment and social capabilities, but did you know that it’s also a great fit at work?

Here are five reasons why:

1) Outlook Mobile

It’s no secret that many of us are obsessed with our email accounts. The first thing I do when I get a new phone is set up my email – all three. And thankfully, it takes mere seconds on the Lumia. It doesn’t matter if you have one or more accounts – Lumia smartphones support multiple POP/IMAP and ActiveSync accounts.

Just enter your email address and password, and in some cases your username and domain, and you’re good to go. You don’t have to stare at the phone while waiting for your mailboxes to synchronize. Let the phone take care of that while you move on to more exciting things like setting up Facebook, Twitter and LinkedIn, or downloading apps.

To make your life easier, you can link your email accounts so that you don’t have to click on separate tiles to read your emails. Everything’s behind one tile, and in the same conversations view. Appointments from different accounts are also packaged in one view and can be colour-coded, freeing you from the pain of dealing with multiple calendars.

2) Apps

Immediately after setting up my email accounts, I move onto apps, because let’s face it, a smartphone isn’t much without apps. Apps favoured by business users in genres such as messaging, productivity, document management and viewing, news and information, CRM and field force automation are starting to grow in number in the Windows Phone Marketplace.

Business-relevant apps for Windows Phone that were announced just last month (May 2012) include LinkedIn, with some functionality (companies and jobs) better than the apps for iOS and Android, and Prontoforms, a mobile forms app that eliminates costly, slow and error prone paper form processes.

Good Technology’s Good for Enterprise app, bringing secure access to corporate email, contacts, and calendar, went live in April. And the list goes on. With Windows Phone gaining in popularity, expect to see more of the world’s leading business apps appear in Marketplace.

3) People Hub and Live Tiles

No man is an island… Not even if you’re a one-man or one-woman operation. You have clients, agencies and other sorts of teams to deal with. That’s where the People Hub comes in handy.

Once you’ve set up your work and social accounts, the Lumia merges your address book with your Facebook, LinkedIn and Twitter contacts so that everyone is accessible from a single tile. 

You can also create groups of contacts, such as Teammates, Agency XYZ, Suppliers… Or by any other name that you refer to them, and pin those tiles to your  start screen to see real-time updates, get notifications of messages, or reach them all via sms or email at one go. It’s a lot easier than adding people one by one from your phone book to your email or sms.

And if you have a favourite person that you deal with every day – say your boss – you can pin his or her tile on the start screen, so there’s no excuse to say “I couldn’t find you in my phone book.”

4) Office Hub incorporating Office Mobile, OneNote, SharePoint and SkyDrive

The Office Hub is accessible with just one tap of the Office icon, giving you immediate access to a bunch of business goodies. Create, read or edit Word, Excel and PowerPoint documents. Because Office Mobile was created by Microsoft, it’s no third party app, which means it’s absolutely safe to use at work, and what you see on your PC is what you get on your mobile – and vice versa.

OneNote is an easy way to keep track of things, whether it’s personal or work-related. And if you’re living in 2012, you’ll know that notes are no longer just boring words on a boring blank sheet.

OneNote lets you take a photo, choose an image from your photo album, or even record voices and sounds, which you can then keep on your phone for future reference, or share right away with your team. You can also save your files in the cloud using SkyDrive or your company SharePoint, making them accessible by others.

5) Cloud services

It seems like we hear a new business buzzword every other day. The ‘cloud’ is just one of them. Lumia smartphones bring cloud services right to business folks with Office 365 and its connectivity with Microsoft Exchange, Lync and SharePoint online services.

SkyDrive is another cloud service from Microsoft that allows you to store and share files, as well as access them from your PC or smartphone.

But the real benefit from cloud services is the cost saving that it brings companies, no matter what the size, as the need for physical servers is eliminated. Better still, Microsoft’s cloud services for Windows Phone comes with all the appropriate layers of security and compliance. Not bad for a service that you can’t see, don’t you think?

Check out another five reasons why the Lumia is great for business.

image credit: Dwonderwall