At Innovia, we’ve been selling Office 365 for years. We sold it back in the days when it was originally released and called BPOS (Business Productivity Online Suite). Since those early days, so much has changed, but one thing that hasn’t is the value that it provides our clients. Well, actually I take that back, it’s a better value now than it’s ever been. Let’s look at some of the recent changes and I think you too will be excited about them.
Back in October, Microsoft announced changes in the structured plans. There used to be small business plans for customers with less than 25 users, and a mid-size plan for those under 300. These plans were dropped with the introduction of 3 new plans. The one plan that excites me is the Office 365 Business plan. We run in to customers that want to replace a few PCs and they aren’t ready to migrate everyone to Office 365 for hosting their email or SharePoint yet, but they need to get Office. You can purchase an OEM copy from HP or Dell for around $200, or you could subscribe to Office 365 and for $99 a year. But on top of Office, you would also get OneDrive for Business and have 1 TB of storage space that you could access from anywhere.
If you’re ready to move your entire team, you also have the option for as little as $150 per user per year, they would have the latest version of Office, hosted Exchange email, OneDrive for Business, Lync, and Office on their mobile devices. Microsoft has also since announced that starting in 2015, users of OneDrive for Business will be given unlimited storage rights.
Let’s look at a few more of the changes announced or release in just the past couple of weeks:
- Microsoft released Word, Excel, and PowerPoint apps for the iPhone and iPad to Office365 and non Office365 users for free
- Microsoft released a preview of the upcoming generally available Office for Android Tablets
- OneDrive for Business Sync for Mac
- Office 365 Video – a secure, company-wide destination for video upload, sharing and playback on all devices
- OneDrive for Android
If you’re still not convinced that Microsoft is continually improving and giving you more for you money then you need to check out their roadmap for Office 365.
