The Benefits of Office 365 For Small Business
Email has become such an invaluable asset that lots of companies rely on the service to communicate with customers. The original cloud service is an integral part of today’s business. The following blog post will discuss the benefits of Office 365, more specifically, how you can save money from moving away from a service like Microsoft Exchange to Office 365 and raise employee productivity throughout the organization.
Cost
Moving to the cloud can be a big cost. Whether a company is migrating over or starting a new email, the amount of time and planning that goes into the project really depends on the size of the organization. Once all of the users in the company have been moved over to the cloud, the cost drops dramatically. This can be explained using a fictitious business. Ben’s Bakery is a dessert shop who employs 5 employees all with their own computer and productivity applications. Currently Ben’s Bakery has all employees setup on a Microsoft Exchange environment. Everyone’s email is located on a physical server box in the office. Here’s where the cost savings come into play. If Ben’s Bakery has a managed service provider maintaining the server, that cost money. If the server is out of warranty or needs to be replaced, that also cost money. Say the server were to go down and the technical team came onsite to resolve the issue, another expense for the company. Do you see a trend here? Having all of the employees email accounts on the cloud saves all of the maintenance, management, and ongoing support for the company. Companies like Microsoft and Google are the ones maintaining the servers and performing all of the patches, updates, and so forth without a penny coming out of your pocket for these services. The best part about moving to Office 365, all modifications to the email system are transparent to the you and your end users, which helps save time and cost on training.
Why Office 365
We mentioned Google and Microsoft are the big players in the cloud email industry. Not to get too far in the weeds, Google is another extremely reliable cloud email option. We’ll discuss Google Apps for Work on another blog post. To focus on Microsoft Office 365, we partner with a lot of professional service companies who utilize Windows and Microsoft Office for their day to day operations. When we collaborate on a email project or consult on migrating over to a new email system, we tend to nudge the customer in this direction. Why? Because keeping the workflow of the company consistent and transparent is something we practice with all of our customers. If the customer enjoys and has been working within the Microsoft eco-system we review the requirements and determine if Office 365 may be a good fit for them. The goal of any project is to keep cost down, maintain transparency throughout the project, and deliver on the exact requirements. Office 365 is a suitable email solution for any size business and all of our customers have had success utilizing the service.
More Benefits
In addition to the benefits discussed, below is a bullet list of Office 365 features that all businesses can assess for their own email environment and determine if Office 365 is right for them.
- Office 365 lives in the cloud which means accessibility from anywhere with an internet connection
- Patches and maintenance are managed by service providers such as Google and Microsoft
- Collaborating internally has become a lot easier with Office applications now in the cloud
- Efficient internal communication with Lync instant message and video conferencing
- Flexibility for the business as owners can pay as you go and add email accounts
Conclusion
We want businesses to have an understanding of how email systems work. Cloud services are on the rise with many companies moving the email infrastructure to the cloud. Alleviating unnecessary expenses is a benefit we consult with numerous customers of ours on a regular basis. Have some questions, let’s chat in the comments section below and get to know one another!
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Thanks @GravityUSA for the comment! How is business going these days?