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by Chris Day @ Fully Managed™ Microsoft will officially launch Office 365 on June 28 at an event in New York City. Hosted by Microsoft CEO Steve Ballmer, the show will kick off at 10AM local time (7AM PT) and be available via a live Webcast. Key partners and customers from around the US will be present at the event.
We couldn't be more thrilled about what Office 365 means for both our clients and Fully Managed™. In fact, we are so confident in this offering that we believe that 80% or greater of our clients in Vancouver and Edmonton will be migrated to Office 365 within 18 months of the launch date. Here are a few of the reasons that as a Microsoft partner we are so excited:
Clients with aging IT infrastructure can quickly and painlessly be migrated to a full suite technologies which normally would require careful planning and execution. New clients can be moved to the cloud virtually instantly with complete peace of mind that the infrastructure can support their business. For us, this means we can handle a greater volume of client migrations and new implementations than ever before - with the same team!
The majority of our small and medium-sized clients historically have not been able to afford the entire "Microsoft stack" in their server room. With Office 365, our clients not only get e-mail & calendaring, but also Office Web Apps (enabling the ability to edit spreadsheets - for example - in a web page, in Firefox if they so choose!), Website & Collaboration (enabling the spinning up of public or partner facing sites and allowing for the first time ever true business-to-business collaboration via SharePoint), IM & Online meetings (whether a one-on-one video chat with a colleague or a meeting with many attendees via Lync). We'll be hosting a number of seminars for our clients to "show and tell" just how powerful all of these tools are to drive efficiency and ultimately client experience.
Whether a prospective client has 10 staff or 10,000, the processes we build as a partner to move them to the cloud are clearly defined from start-to-finish, meaning we can take on larger clients than we normally would when we are responsible for building out the back-end. This opens up a whole new market of clients for us as we have typically been focused on clients with 10 to 250 employees.
Instead of spending thousands (or hundreds of thousands) of dollars with us to migrate platform, clients are able to re-allocate budget for more interesting and strategic initiatives such as customization and training - areas in which we actually are more profitable and more valuable to our clients. It's time to face the reality that few companies will spend money deploying servers which they can subscribe to in the cloud, in the very near future.
One of the big opportunities we see with Office 365 is to get all of our clients running on a consistent client platform. For our clients, this means far greater productivity and peace of mind as power users are able to cross-train the entire user base. As a Managed Services Provider, we thrive on stable and consistent environments which ultimately reduce our costs (and increase our profitability) when supporting our clients. With Microsoft enabling both P and E plans with the option to effectively rent Office 365 on a per user, per year basis it becomes virtually a no-brainer to get everyone running on the latest, greatest Microsoft Office 2010 software. Software deployment, patch management, and training initiatives (for example) all become much more straightforward.
