Popular Office 365 Questions

Hi Habr!

Let's talk about the experience of a small IT-company - a managed partner of Microsoft with gold and silver competencies. Two geographically distributed offices use Office 365 in their daily work and help their clients migrate / integrate.
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Of course, any innovations raise doubts and questions, and even more so such global and technologically advanced services as Office 365. Without duplicating the FAQ that is on the Office 365 website , below we will answer five small questions that are usually asked by the client in the process familiarity with the proposal to transfer part of the IT infrastructure to the cloud. Perhaps these answers will help you overcome doubts and try Office 365 in your workflow.

How to motivate a guide to migrate to Office 365?

Any attempts to break the usual work schedule are met with resistance from management and colleagues. It's not just laziness and habit. Look at the conservatism of others from the other side: old solutions are time tested and well studied - they don’t need to prove anything. But the novelty scares is a certain risk, the need to learn a new one.

In a conversation with the leadership, you can pay attention to the main advantages of cloud services:

1. Savings. Do not need your server, another expensive iron. We save money on equipment, power supply and rental of premises where all this collects dust. No longer requires a one-time purchase of software licenses, we also save on the seasonality of the business - we pay only for the licenses that are actually used. Implementation of the solution and its subsequent support are greatly simplified - we save time.

2. Flexibility. If a company is growing rapidly or, conversely, reduces staff, it becomes easier to adapt the structure of IT services to work, connect / disconnect new employees. Opening a branch in another region is no longer a problem.

3. Mobility. Available wherever there is internet. You can cheer at home, you can work in traffic. There is a browser - there is a workplace. Office 365 is not bad friends with smartphones and tablets, which is not surprising.

A delicate question that may be very interesting for management: how to entrust your information to a third-party service? Sometimes the issue of trust is difficult to solve with rational arguments, but let's try.

What is obvious? A server with Exchange or SharePoint in a remote data center is no longer stolen or confiscated. This is a big plus. Protection and availability is now on the shoulders of Microsoft. Signed SLA, backed by financial obligations, which shows the guaranteed level of availability of 99%. Software in the cloud is constantly updated, and, imperceptibly for the user - therefore, there are fewer holes for intruders. And the most important thing is reliability: no need to think about backup schemes, testing backups, problems with disks and other equipment. Fires in half with floods work no longer interfere. Our information is always kept safe in geographically distributed data centers. Obviously, there are more pluses than minuses.

In addition, if the issue of security of individual information is very serious - critical mailboxes can be placed on their servers, and the rest of the mass of ordinary employees in the cloud.

If management still has doubts and concerns, this is work for such partner companies. We need to get together, sit down and try to figure out where they are real and have a place to be, and where they are contrived.

How to try correctly?

In addition to the manual, there are also users whose fears we talked about above. If people are afraid of losing time, it will be very interesting to show them how they can save it.

Get a free test account for 25 users for 1 month, find several progressive like-minded colleagues: for example, a lawyer, a sales manager and someone from the warehouse. Let the manager save the contracts to SharePoint Online, the lawyer instantly edits and approves them, and the warehouse in Lync shows with a video call that one part of the order does not fit the other. Do not run to a lawyer, do not run to the warehouse.

Such an exaggerated and banal example can be reduced to one piece of advice: start by automating the simplest routine, it is this which takes the most valuable user time. Such a project of several people will not take much time, and the result may exceed all expectations, which once again in the eyes of colleagues will confirm your status as an IT expert.

What about migration?

Migration is a big and very “personal” topic. Many already have Exchange and SharePoint, and maybe their own Lync Server. Of course, you can not lose a single letter and a single document. Microsoft offers a complete set of scripts and tools from manual migration through .PST files to temporarily or permanently merging your IT infrastructure and cloud computing with AD synchronization and transferring users to the cloud and back with one mouse click — the so-called hybrid script.

As Brian Posey wrote : “It’s impossible to approach lightly moving to the cloud.” We need a plan, we need expertise, maybe we need advice. Refer to partners, expertise and the ability to escalate problems at Microsoft makes such help very valuable and useful. It is important not to be afraid to ask questions. The more carefully everything is planned, the less problems will bring in the future.

What tariff plans are there and which one to choose?

Office 365 offers 3 subscription families: P, E, and K. Each has a different functional package and, accordingly, a different price.

The “P” family (while it’s only P1) is designed for small business and freelancers, there is a limit in the number of users - up to 50. Please note: further migration to the “E” tariff plans is not yet possible. The disadvantages of “P” include the lack of telephone support, no desktop Office Professional Plus, and Lync without conferencing and telephony integration. Expected, the main plus is an affordable price, only 198 rubles per user per month.

The most popular and popular tariff plans are presented in the “E” family. There are as many as 4 packages with different content, integration with AD and telephone support is available to everyone. Which of the 4 packages to choose will depend on your desire to use certain services, but with E3 it is already possible to deny yourself anything (except for integration of Lync with telephony).

Both families, and "P" and "E" mailbox size of 25 gigabytes.

“K” will be interesting as an addition to the “E” tariff plans for use at terminals and thin clients by employees without a permanent workplace (for example, freelancers with corporate mail, workers in the workshop at the plant, couriers ...).

In addition, Office 365 allows you to create special tariff plans with a combination of various services. So, you can create the desired set without unnecessary services. You can also buy a subscription to Microsoft Dynamics CRM online for 1452r. per user per month, rent Office Professional 2010 desktop package, order archiving option for Exchange Online.

What are partners?

When purchasing Office 365, companies often see offers from two syndication (read, selling Office 365 as part of their product) Microsoft partners: SKB Contour and Beeline. The peculiarity of such a purchase is that the cost of the service will be slightly higher, and it is impossible to migrate from the syndication model of the purchase to the direct model, just like back. Direct partners (IT Partner’s promo page ), sell Office 365 without other products, plus they try to offer related services and services.

That's all. Of course, you still have questions, ask Microsoft, contact partners, not a single problem and not a single question will remain unanswered. And if you philosophize a little, in general, Office 365 is in itself one big answer. The answer to the needs of the business, the answer to the trends of its time.

Thank you for reading.