Microsoft Office 365 comes packed with many features and benefits. The main benefit is the offloading of responsibility for uptime from your IT infrastructure over to Microsoft, potentially saving you time, worry and money. Furthermore your company gets to continue to use the software that they have always used. From an end user point of view very little may change, depending on which Microsoft Office 365 package is subscribed to.
Some of the key benefits to Office 365 are as follows:
Potential Cost Savings
Now we say potential for a reason. It all depends on the quantity of users, amount of data and reliability on email. If for example you have 10,000 users with small mailboxes Office 365 may not be for you and investing in Exchange Servers is more cost effective (we can help with that too!). It is really down to the company. However I would say that 95% of the time it will be more cost effective to migrate. When you take into account hardware costs, software licenses and maintenance this will usually outweigh your subscription costs to Office 365.
Reliability
Important to note here we are not just talking about the on-premise server itself. Lets say for example you have a power outage or internet connectivity downtime, there is no way for your emails to arrive at your on-premise server. With Office 365 we are on the cloud, although your Microsoft Outlooks may fail to connect a lot of other doors remain open such as email clients on phones, tablets and laptops with wireless dongles.
Accessibility
I am not a huge fan of OneDrive in big corporate environments. It is very buggy and doesn’t reap the benefits of similar software such as Dropbox. Having said that if you are a smaller company and require access to your files on the go the mobile web based version of Office works very well and provide you full access to your OneDrive storage,
Conclusion
Office 365 is a great product from Microsoft, especially when compared to rivals such as Google Apps (which still uses IMAP – at time of print). Anyone considering Office 365 should take a look at their lower end packages on a trial, such as the Exchange E1 plan which comes with 25GB of storage for all of your emails.
Should you and your company wish to talk to us about Office 365, please contact us.