Has your organisation been considering an upgrade to Microsoft Office 365 from on-premises Office/Exchange? Perhaps you’re holding back because the word, upgrade is enough to scare anyone away. Most companies don’t commit to an upgrade until they are forced to. But in the case of Office 365, the benefits you’ll get from making a move that is delightfully easy are without a doubt worth the commitment. Here are just a few very good reasons to upgrade to Office 365:

1. Everything You Need For Improved Office Productivity And Collaboration Under One Umbrella

Like Office on-premises, Office 365 has Word, Excel, PowerPoint and Outlook, but it also includes more applications for improved productivity and collaboration, including OneDrive for Business, Microsoft Teams, Yammer, SharePoint, and OneNote, as well as powerful tools like Delve, Power BI, Sway, Planner, Stream, Forms, and Flow. Everything is in one place, fully integrated, with seamless user experience.

Perhaps the most valuable benefit you’ll get from upgrading to O365 is the ability to collaborate in real-time. All the applications were designed to make it easy to share documents internally and externally. Users can work on documents live while viewing their colleague’s edits, share notes and documents through OneNote, share news and get feedback and answers to questions through Yammer, and conduct productive meetings regardless of location through Teams.

2. Fast, Easy Deployment And Installation

With O365, you can install it locally or run the online versions of any or all of the applications. All it takes is Active Directory credentials, and from the portal, users can access email, contacts, and calendars, and create and edit documents online anytime and from anywhere, on any device.

Installation is also very easy. To install Office 365 on a home PC, the user simply logs into the Office.com portal, click Install Office Apps, and select Office from the list. This provides instant access to all the organisation’s shared content and files. From the same portal and tab, the user can also send an installation link to phones and tablets as an email or text message. One-click, and all Office applications download and allow access to all emails, shared content, and files from work. It’s that easy.

3. Smooth, Seamless Software Updates

With O365, the old way of updating software is a thing of the past. Updates no longer need to be installed in each machine or pushed out using Group Policy, system configuration manager, or similar management tools. All Office 365 updates are automatically downloaded and installed, just like Windows updates. Admins can set up users on a standard or targeted release, depending on business processes and structure. Regardless, all applications stay current without intervention, and users can continue to run all Office applications while updates are installing in the background.

4. Reliable, Expert Support On Two Levels

Office 365 support is managed within the Admin Center, where users can submit support requests directly to Microsoft. Also, through the Admin Center, administrators can easily add and remove users, manage and update security settings, view user reports and statistics, and monitor the health dashboard to determine how Office 365 applications and connectivity are performing. (We can manage this for you)

5. Security And Reliability Backed By Microsoft

O365 has built-in, award-winning security, backed by Microsofts resources and experts. In addition to malware and spam filtering, you get extra layers, such as data loss prevention, multi-factor authentication, advanced threat protection, Safe Links, log-in auditing all monitored from a user-friendly dashboard. Because Office 365 is hosted in the cloud using Microsoft Azure, your staff is relieved from maintaining data centre requirements. Microsoft patches servers automatically, taking this responsibility off the shoulders of your IT team.

6. Freedom From Hardware, Backups And Storage, Storage, Storage

Moving to Office 365 has inherent benefits associated with any technology deployed in the cloud:

• When you switch from Office on-premises to Office 365, you no longer need to worry about the time or money required to replace or upgrade hardware like email servers, and there’s no need for backups. Office 365 includes Exchange Online, so after a one-time movement of mailboxes, you’re done with all that.
• With on-premises file storage and exchange servers, everything must be maintained by your IT team. Shared file locations, email distribution lists, archiving, and security groups must be created and maintained. With Office 365, this functionally can be self-managed by users, which is convenient for everyone and reduces user requests. Users can create groups, assign members, and set up teams.
• Office 365 offers more storage capacity for files than most organisations will ever need, and your IT staff will be happy to hear they no longer have to manage storage space locally. If a users account is intentionally disabled, all files will be automatically archived or removed after 30 days. Files can be dragged and dropped to OneDrive and accessed from other devices. Your OneDrive automatically syncs your files and changes to all your other devices, including deletions. No more saving and reconciling multiple versions of files.
• Since Active Directory is synced from your on-premises servers to Azure and is available even if your on-premises Active Directory is unreachable, you no longer have to build redundancy in your on-premises environment because it is being managed in the cloud.

It’s Time To Make The Move To

For more information, download the latest brochure, or Get in touch today to talk about making the move to Office 365!