By Curtis Bagnall, Solution Engineer at Umbrella Managed Systems, talking about the trend of customers migrating to Office 365.
Here at Umbrella, we’ve been seeing a lot of our customers interested in moving to Office 365 for email, calendar and contact management.
What is O365, and why are organizations moving to it? How will moving to O365 effect my company’s workflow? Will making the move to O365 be more cost effective than what I’m currently using now? These are only a few of the questions I get when talking with companies about making the move to a cloud-based exchange server.
So, what is Office 365?
O365 comes in 2 parts. The first part is that it’s a cloud-based hosted exchange server that will host you email, contact and calendar database. Second, it has subscription offerings for the Microsoft Office suite of applications. These include Outlook, Word, Excel, and so on depending on the subscription level.
How is this different then having my Exchange server in my building?
Expense. When you have an on-premise server, you generally need to replace it every five years. On top of that, when it comes to upgrading licensing, it can bring the costs up to the tens of thousands of dollars. Instead of having a hefty capital expense when you need to upgrade, you’ll have an operational expense that saves you from overspending and surprises. Also, your data is now in the cloud on Microsoft’s servers. That means your data is always available to you no matter where you are. And it’s always backed up, so the chance for data loss is almost zero.
What benefits will the end users see?
Every user that gets a license for the office suite will be able to install Microsoft Office on up to five devices. If they have a laptop, tablet, desktop, or phone, they can install the program on all of them instead of having to buy individual licenses for each device. Each user will get up to 7GB of online storage space to save their documents to if they need to access them from different devices, or just want them to be securely backed up.
Every two years or so, Microsoft comes out with the latest and greatest version of the Office Suite. In the past, if you wanted the new version, you’d have to buy a new license for it. Now, as soon as the newest version of Office is released, you can upgrade without any additional costs.
These are just a few of the benefits when migrating your company to O365. There are many more! If you would like to know more, or talk about some of the options that would benefit your company, please give us a call. We will gladly discuss and answer any questions you may have.
