Microsoft

Three Reasons You Should Switch to Office 365

Office 2013 will soon be here, along with a new and improved version of the cloud-based Office 365. If you’re looking to upgrade, you have to decide whether the traditional desktop version of Office is the way to go, or if Office 365 is a better fit for your needs.

Office 2013 is impressive, but Office 365 is a better value in most cases.

1. Cost
Microsoft hasn’t yet shared what the price tag will be for the new Office 2013. But, unless it follows the same bold path laid out in offering Windows 8 for a mere $40, history suggests the new productivity suite will start somewhere in the $150 neighborhood.

Office 365 plans start at $4 per month. Small businesses can get access to Exchange, SharePoint, and Lync in addition to the core Office productivity applications for only $6 per month. Larger businesses that want to take advantage of Active Directory integration can do so for $8 per user per month.

Breaking those down, it takes more than three years to reach $150 based on the $4 per month plan, and more than 18 months under the $8 per month plan. The 18 months is less time than a business typically gets out of an investment in the desktop Office software, but it also comes with more than the software itself.

Of course, those are the current subscription prices and plans for Office 365, so those figures are subject to change as well.

2. Updates and Maintenance
What else do you get with your Office 365 subscription? An IT department. Sure, you can set up your own Exchange Server, SharePoint Server, and Lync infrastructure. You can manage and maintain the desktop Microsoft Office software, and install the patches and updates every month yourself. How much will that cost?

Consider that implementing the same capabilities in-house requires servers, and network infrastructure, and IT personnel to install, manage, update, and maintain it all. Plus, you still have to buy and maintain the Office software itself.

With Office 365, Microsoft takes care of all the dirty work so you don’t have to. Updates, patches, and upgrades just happen in the background without you needing to worry about it. When the server crashes, its Microsoft’s problem. When a hard drive needs to be replaced, Microsoft will handle it. You get the benefits of using Office without any of the headaches of updating and maintaining it all.

3. Accessibility
Office 365 lives in the cloud. That means you have access to Word, Excel, Outlook, and other Microsoft Office tools from anywhere you can get a Web connection, and from virtually any device–Windows or Mac desktops and laptops, Android devices, iPhones, iPads, and other smartphones and tablets.

Office Web Apps provide basic features and functions for free.This isn’t quite the selling point it once was for a couple reasons. First, even with the desktop Office 2013 suite Microsoft is pushing users to save files to the cloud-based SkyDrive, or to a SharePoint server by default. So, there’s no reason the data can’t be accessible regardless of whether you choose Office 2013 or Office 365.

The second reason it may not be all that compelling is that Office Web Apps are already available for free from the SkyDrive site. So, even without Office 365 users can create, view, and edit Word, Excel, PowerPoint, and OneNote files from the Web.

For businesses, though, SharePoint, Active Directory, and other elements of Office 365 that go beyond simply creating and editing Office documents still make Office 365 a better value.

Your mileage will vary of course. There are a number of factors involved in calculating the cost of purchasing, installing, configuring, updating, and maintaining Microsoft Office and the accompanying back-end services versus the ongoing subscription costs associated with Office 365. Office 365 is a solid service providing tremendous bang for the buck, though, so it won’t be easy to beat the value it brings to the table.

What is Microsoft Forefront?

This is exactly the question that I asked Tom Shinder, a Microsoft MVP on the Forefront Security product. He spent some time and came up with this posting for us to help you understand Microsoft’s offering around Forefront.

What is Microsoft Forefront?

Have you heard friends or colleagues mention Microsoft Forefront and wonder what they were talking about? If so, you’re not alone, as Microsoft Forefront is relatively new and just beginning to get real traction in the network security market.

The first thing you need to know is that there is no “Forefront” product. Instead, Forefront is a collection of Microsoft security products. This collection of Forefront security products is referred to as the “Forefront Security Suite”

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Microsoft’s PerformancePoint Server and Proclarity Analytics

photo credit: kevindooley

It’s often we have requests from customers on Proclarity, but few know that it is part of a much more complete Business Intelligence (BI) package from Microsoft called Microsoft PerformancePoint Server. This solution encompasses more than just traditional charts and graphs. It provides modules that integrate with the applications you use on a daily basis. Microsoft PerformancePoint Server 2007 is built from Microsoft’s Proclarity Analytics product.

Traditionally we think of BI as just the reports we run off of our database. While this model works, it is a limited view of what it can provide your organization. This is why Microsoft has invested heavily in this space and came up with PerformancePoint. Their goal was to provide a tool that can become a framework for delivering reporting across your organization. Without a standard tool it is difficult to see trends in your data outside of your group.

How many excel reports do you get? Do you use more than 1 tool to perform reports within your company? Do you have Microsoft SQL Server and Microsoft Reporting Services but only have a few reports to show for it? PerformancePoint is a solution that can give you a consistent, common data model to work from for monitoring, analytics and planning.

Key Performance Indicators (KPI’s) are tools you can use to make quick decisions. The challenges are getting all of this information in a format that can be used for reporting. The other challenge is how to disseminate this information to the masses in a way that is secure, easy to understand and highlights the right information. This is one of the many features such as dashboards and scorecarding built into PerformancePoint. You can deliver this information via SharePoint Web Services to your employees, also incorporating security from the various sources such as Microsoft SQL Server and Microsoft Reporting Services.

Finally, if your business has to do financial reporting, this is a tool that can help you with the planning and delivering of these reports.

ISInc has recently put together a number of PerformancePoint courses that will help you get up to speed on all of the available features in this application. We have courses on just the planning modules, or on the end-to-end solution.  This is a great compliment to SharePoint Training.

Have Software Assurance? Don’t Let Your Training Vouchers Expire!

Many Microsoft License packages include the option for Microsoft Software Assurance. If your organization has an Enterprise Agreement, or have purchased Software Assurance with your current license package, be sure to take advantage of the free training or consulting services available to your organization. More »

Attend select Microsoft Exchange 2007 courses and receive a FREE copy of Office Communications Server Software

For a limited time only, you will receive a FREE copy of Office Communications Server* with each of the selected Exchange 2007 courses for distribution when you attend the class. More »

Get a FREE copy of Office 2007 Enterprise Edition Software

For a limited time only, you will receive a FREE copy of Microsoft Office 2007 Enterprise Edition (single user) with each of the selected Vista courses for distribution when you attend the class. More »