Here, colleagues tried to answer the question: What is Microsoft Office 365 and how can it help the company? - what caused the reader's comment:
Nothing is clear. How much does it cost to deploy this product? The advantages are more or less clear. How many accounts does it have, what are the risks? At least some numbers would have led.
We would like to give some numbers
Of course, it is not Microsoft’s business to count all the numbers for a specific client; But the numbers depend on many other inputs that the integrator will request from the client, so if you try to simply buy a package of products on
www.office.com , you will be asked for the number of licenses. And the client will be left alone with the amount that needs to be commented and justified: what will it bring to the company? cost optimization - what exactly is this optimization expressed in which numbers? How profitable is it in the long run?

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When modeling our calculator to calculate ROI for Office 365, we tried to avoid extremes: ask the user a million questions, or just silently count the number of licenses in different packages. When filling out the form, the client is asked specific questions that are as close as possible to the business objectives, they are asked the specific features that are needed, and on this basis it is decided which position to choose.
Since, in reality, it is difficult for an inexperienced user to
understand the licensing scheme of MS Office. There are 2 separate lines - Business and Enterpise, in which different packages, different sets of functions (
E1, E3, E5 ), and it’s not easy to choose what is better in a particular case, not to mention the intricacies of
implementation . We didn’t take into account not all the factors that may affect the choice - otherwise the form would become too bloated (there will be a million questions), but we tried to choose only those that we consider to be key.
Parameters for calculating ROI:
- Number of users
- Initial decision costs
- The average amount of additional costs to maintain the decision, USD / month.
- Forecast period
- Average salary of operating personnel
- The average salary of technical staff
- The percentage of employees whose work is related to the creation and viewing of documentation
- The percentage of employees whose work requires regular participation in conference calls
- Percentage of decision makers based on business intelligence data
- Percentage of employees working with mobile devices
- Company monthly expenses for mobile communication, international and long-distance calls
- Number of information security incidents per month
- How many times a month is it necessary to repair or replace the PC?
- Implementation risk (There are 2 risks: the risk of implementation is the probability of successful implementation of the project, depending on the competence of the implementers, support of your management, staff qualifications, etc.
- Discount rate (most often use the bank interest rate on deposits. After all, the project should be more profitable than a bank deposit)
Parameters for selecting a package and drafting specifications, you need to specify the number of users and the period of use, as well as the need for key features, depending on which package will be selected:
- SharePoint Online
- Power BI service
- Desktop MS Office Applications
- Business Email Hosting
- Skype for Business Online
- Azure Rights Management (RMS)
- Connect to Skype conferences from your phone
So, our
ROI calculator for Office 365What is the calculator model built on?
The ROI model of our calculator is built largely on the results of a
study by
Forrester Consulting , commissioned by Microsoft. The aim of the study was to determine the overall economic effect and potential return on investment in enterprises as a result of the implementation of Office 365 E5.
Fifty organizations were examined that met the following criteria:
- they all used office 365 e5
- headquartered in North America or the UK
- number of employees - at least 2000
- most common industries: corporate and private sector services, technology, manufacturing, financial services, government
Sources of profit from the implementation:- Saving time employees of the company
- Employees whose work involves creating and viewing documents saved an average of 2 hours per week.
- Employees whose work requires regular participation in conference calls saved 1.5 business hours per week.
- Employees working from mobile devices saved about 2 hours and 15 minutes a week.
- Employees making decisions based on business intelligence data saved 4 hours 45 minutes a week using Power BI Pro and MyAnalytics
- Reducing the number of information security incidents by 50% reduces the time spent by IT-specialists to eliminate them
- Reducing the cost of telephone calls. The cost of mobile communications, international and long-distance calls decreased by 14.2%
- Reduce downtime when replacing or repairing a PC. Previously, if necessary, repair or replace a working computer was lost an average of 3.5 hours of working time for each such incident. Microsoft Office 365 allowed employees to work from another computer in the office or from home while their primary PC worker is being repaired or replaced.
What do integrators say
We asked for an integrator comment about the difficulties in implementing and licensing office 365 products and how relevant such or a similar calculator might be:
“The main difficulty in implementation is the human factor, simply sabotage. “We don’t want to work in the cloud - that's all!” Storytelling: how it slows down, how slowly it works and so on. You make a test, measure, show - all the rules. “But we do not want to enable caching, because it slows down the car!”. - Do you need mail as a tool or do you check it every second? - No, I want to see every second that mail goes to me, etc. Simply fighting the stereotypes regarding the clouds.
For some time now, we stopped going to the IT directors, but we go straight to the financiers, and then we speak the same language: droplets, opexes, they count money, and they say - let's go! And after that, the business is asking for ithnikov - do it, that's all.
And for its employees, these are unnecessary worries that they don’t want to mess around with. Plus, in this they see the danger that they will lose “white-collar control” over the company, they will become unnecessary. That is, if before they went to them like kings to bow at every sneeze, but now there will be a cloud that works stably. For them, the cloud - a competition that they do not need.ROI4CIO: using a calculator you can also show the price of the product and what it consists of.
- In most cases, practice shows that Microsoft’s vision of what the client needs is different from what the client really needs. We very often come to the client and explain that a big vendor wants to sell this and this to you, but other options in the same Microsoft offer will suit your needs more, we try to help the client figure it out. In this case, we are always on the client’s side. So that he doesn’t buy too much, because in this case, we, as a direct partner, have a loyal client who will turn to other questions (and the same Microsoft products and solutions).
In addition to the large number of options for Office 365 products, there are many options for payment: monthly, quarterly, annually. Seasonally, for example, if a person needs a certain number of licenses only during the hot season for his business. If a license is a business, it’s relatively easy to add / subtract, and if an enterprise is, it’s hard to add something. but to subtract is difficult, it is difficult to adjust the infrastructure, and of course all this needs to be helped by the client to figure it out.
As for such a calculator, it seems to me that for large corporations, in any case, thorough IT consulting and difficult implementation will be necessary, but for small and medium businesses this can be useful. Especially in the case when the client is not always aware of all the capabilities of office 365 products, and even more so when he does not know all the pitfalls when calculating specifications. ”Of course, any model, just a model, is how we see the needs of Office 365 customers. Experienced testing is also needed for our model. Therefore, we will welcome feedback from customers and specialists who implement these solutions.
ROI Calculator for Office365