From businesses in Southwest Florida, to U.S. government agencies, to schools and universities in Eastern and Central Europe, more and more organizations are moving to Microsoft Office 365. For this suite of software, it’s all about the cloud.
Office 365 is a subscription service that offers hosted email and all the latest office programs such as Word, Excel and Access. Businesses that want to have immediate access to their data at any time in any place where there is an Internet connection are warming up to it.
Office 365’s full office suite includes many of the same types of software programs that you use every day – word processing, spreadsheet, database, Outlook mail, the instant-messaging client Lync, and publishing apps among them. A small business can sign up for an annual subscription for $150 a year for five users. These are full-featured applications plus “extras” that include a shared calendar, a 25GB mailbox with virus and spam protection, and 10 gigabytes of cloud storage space per user. Other per-employee packages are also available.
Office 365 is also proving to be a prudent tool in terms of a business’s budget. Many of our clients are realizing the economic advantage of having software products working off the cloud as opposed to being on-premise: reduced maintenance time and costs, and transfer of liability. That’s because Microsoft maintains the IT servers, not you. So the real savings is not having to service equipment because there is no equipment when you’re hosting in the cloud.
There are many good reasons to look into an annual subscription to Office 365, but it may not make sense for every business. Give us a call, or send an e-mail now, and we’ll set up a consultation to see if Office 365 is right for you.
