Microsoft is offering this bundle for many different sized companies and industries at a variety of different price points, but the ones that I want to focus on today are the Microsoft 365 Business and Microsoft 365 Enterprise plans.

Microsoft 365 Business

Microsoft 365 Business is a bundle for the small and midsized business (SMB) market. This bundle has a hard cap of 300 users. You can mix and match Business and Enterprise bundles up to 300 users, but when the 301st user is added all the bundles need to be upgraded to Enterprise bundles. 

This $20 per user per month plan Includes all the applications that you will find in the Office 365 Business Premium bundle. In addition, the Microsoft 365 bundle gives users access to security features like information protection policies to help control how information is accessed, company data management on mobile devices, and archiving capacities with continuous data backup that is accessible anytime/anywhere. This bundle also includes device management features such as the ability to manage iOS, Android and Mac devices, self-service PC deployment with Windows Autopilot, and simplified controls for managing Windows 10 Pro PCs.

Microsoft 365 Enterprise

Microsoft 365 Enterprise comes in two different varieties, Microsoft 365 E3 and Microsoft 365 E5. Both plans have no limit on the number of users in an organization and can be mixed and matched in any configuration. These plans are more full-featured and as a result much more expensive that the Microsoft 365 Business plan.

The Microsoft E3 plan is $34 per user per month and the Microsoft E5 plan is $61. Microsoft E3 includes more robust versions of the information protection, identity management, and threat protection feature sets. In addition to those more full-featured sets found in the Microsoft E3 bundle, the E5 bundle gives customers access to Microsoft Power BI, Audio Conferencing, Advanced compliance, Azure Info Protection P2, Azure Active Directory P2, and O365 Threat Intelligence.

If you are looking for Microsoft licensing guidance, or more information about Microsoft 365 bundles, please feel free to reach out to our Microsoft Consulting Services team.

Learn more about DMC's Microsoft Partnership.

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Traditionally, Microsoft has allowed small and medium sized organizations to purchase Office 365 licenses through two different programs, Open and Advisor. Organizations who purchase their licenses through the Open program buy these licenses from a Microsoft partner and pay for 12 months up front at the time of purchase.  Those who buy their licenses through the Advisor program sign up for an annual contract directly with Microsoft and pay for their licenses on a month by month basis.

In late 2015, a third option for purchasing Office 365 licenses was introduced, the Cloud Solutions Provider program (CSP). The CSP program combines the monthly payment element of the Advisor model with the personalization and attentiveness that organizations have come to expect when purchasing their Office 365 licenses from a Microsoft partner.
 
CSP allows licensing flexibility without penalty.  Purchasing Office 365 licenses directly from Microsoft through the Advisor program requires an organization to either sign an annual contract or pay a premium to have a month-to-month licensing agreement. The Open program is also an annual contract and requires up-front payment for the entire year.  Refunds are not available through Open if an organization wishes to discontinue their use of Office 365 before their 12-month commitment is up. With the CSP program, an organization can pay for their licenses on a monthly basis, and they do not need to pay a premium for the ability to cancel their service any time they want.
 

CSP also allows organizations to work with their Microsoft partner to define the billing process that works best for them.  While the Advisor program does provide organizations with the ability to spread out the cost of their licenses by paying for them on a monthly basis, it also adds an additional vendor (Microsoft) and monthly invoice for the accounting department to deal with. If an organization is already working with a Microsoft partner for their Office 365 support services, the organization would have two separate monthly invoices from two separate entities for the ability to use one product! The CSP program allows organizations to pay a single organization for both licenses and related support services.

CSP further simplifies the Office 365 purchasing experience for organizations by allowing organizations to purchase all Office 365 related services through their Microsoft partner. Organizations can work closely with their partner to select the appropriate bundle of services to meet their specific needs and come up with one simple per user/per month cost.  For example, both the CSP and Advisor model offer IT administrator support, but only CSP allows organizations to add 24/7 end user support for all of their team members. This support can be bundled in with services such as additional email archiving, SharePoint back up services, and set up as one per user/per month cost for all of their Office 365 licenses.

If you believe that the flexibility, simplified billing, and customized support services that the CSP program offers are a good fit for your organization, please feel free to Contact Us for a free Office 365 consultation and quote.

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Here are some highlights of the Office 365 E5 plan. 

Collaboration

• Skype Meeting Broadcast – Reach up to 10K coworkers at the same time. Attendees can join from virtually any browser or device.

• PSTN Conferencing – Gives users a dial-in number to join Skype meetings from any device. Provides the ability to dial out to bring participants into the meeting.

• Cloud PB – Gives users a cloud-based PBX system. This ability positions Office 365 as the central location to manage users for communications, email, and content.

• *PSTN Calling – Allows users to make and receive calls from regular phones and phone numbers that can be provisioned through the Microsoft cloud. This feature is an additional $12 a month per user for nationwide calling, and $24 a month per user for international calling plans.

Insight

• Power BI Pro – Gives you fast, easy access to the data you need, including a dashboard that gives you a live 360-degree view of your business. Explore your data and discover new insights.

• Delve Org Analytics – Provides a real-time work map of team engagement. You are able to bring trending & interaction around those topics to the surface. 

Security

• Customer Lockbox – Allows customers to explicitly control all access to data. Experience nearly zero Microsoft interaction with customer content. All access control activities are logged and audited.

• Advanced Threat Protection – Offers protection against unknown malware and viruses. Provides real-time, time-of-click protection against malicious URLs. Click tracking offers rich reporting and URL trace capabilities.

• Equivio Analytics for eDiscovery – Email review is simplified by detection analytics. Predictive coding trains the system to identify relevance. Themes and Search help map unconstructed data.

Learn more about DMC’s Microsoft licensing services. 

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The WPC is a wonderful opportunity to connect with peer Microsoft partners across the U.S. and the rest of the globe to share industry innovations. The extensive programming schedule offers a great deal of technical and business insight, and DMC is proud to be sharing the presentation stage this year alongside many esteemed speakers. 

If you're attending WPC, please join me on Wednesday, July 15 at 2:30 p.m. for my presentation discussing strategies for Microsoft partners to take advantage of Windows Server 2003 Upgrade opportunities. 

With end of support for Windows Server 2003 in July, there is a large wave of customers actively planning their migration to new versions of the operating system and many of these customers already have rights to the latest version of the platform. Hear from Microsoft, as well as partners in the community, about engagement plans that unlock value for customers while growing your revenue base.

Presenter Information
Rick Rietz – DMC, Inc. Since 2006, Rick has focused exclusively on delivering Microsoft Solutions for a wide-variety of small, medium, and large enterprise clients.  He has led many industry-focused Microsoft technology events, including workshops for members of the International Association of Microsoft Channel Partners (IAMCP), Tooling and Manufacturing Association (TMA), Manufacturers’ Agents National Association (MANA), Hand Tools Institute (HTI), the Alliance for Illinois Manufacturing (AIM), and the Control Systems Integrators Association (CSIA).

Rick holds a B.S. in Business with a concentration in Computer Information Systems from Indiana University – Bloomington. He also earned his Project Management Professional (PMP) certification from the Project Management Institute (PMI) in 2006 and is an active participant in the Chicagoland PMI chapter.  Rick is a member of the Microsoft Partner Research Panel, whose purpose is to evolve and improve the Microsoft Partner Network and Microsoft's business products.

Learn more about DMC's Microsoft Consulting Services. 

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Dave discussed the advantages and disadvantages of hosting applications on-premises, in a data center, and in the cloud, which refers to the provision of dynamically scalable and virtualized resources as a service over the Internet. Hosting an application in the Microsoft cloud is provided on a pay-as-you-go basis (I do not have exact numbers) and eliminates the need to manage the server hardware and software yourself. The number of resources required by the application can be increased and decreased as necessary to meet varying loads. This allows the application to serve burst capacity without having to purchase enough hardware to host that capacity.

The Windows Azure platform employs Web roles, which provide the web interface, Worker roles, which perform background processes, and a queue to connect the two. Instances of these roles can be created and destroyed as usage dictates.

Applications can be developed in Visual Studio with the .NET Framework (3.5 initially) and run in a simulated cloud with Azure add-in tools. There is no debugging once the application is in the cloud; logging is used instead with Trace. Listeners are enabled through the application configuration file. Developers can get a free token that allows them limited access for creating applications and to storage in the cloud. Applications can be tested within the cloud in a staging environment, in which usage is still charged, before they are deployed to a final, configured environment. Windows Azure will work with Microsoft and non-Microsoft languages and environments, such as Eclipse, Ruby, PHP, and Python.

SQL Azure is a relational database in the cloud. The data is stored in triplicate for fail-over purposes. There are limitations compared to SQL Server, which can be detected with the SQL Azure Migration Wizard. Connecting to this database with SQL Management Studio requires a trick which is discussed here. It is billed at $9.99/month for 1GB and $99.99 for 10GB.

Joseph Paradi, Innovation Lead for Internal IT with Accenture, discussed his use of Windows Azure for his colleagues inside and outside of the corporate network. He reused existing applications written for the .NET framework with very little rewrite and just a few additions. He emphasized the issue of security and discussed his use of “Geneva” server to provide authentication and authorization. Whereas most people rely on physical security for their application, the cloud will require better models. He also mentioned the use of SSIS to synchronize data between SQL Azure and SQL Server.

I am still mulling over how Windows Azure can be used for our customers. DMC’s custom solutions do not tend to need extreme amounts of server resources nor are they typically subject to temporary spikes in activity that might require large resource reallocation. However, our customer’s could benefit from the hardware and data redundancy of the cloud that will keep their applications running fast and reliably. It would also free our customers and us from having to acquire and configure the server hardware. Being aware of Windows Azure will allow us to develop applications using paradigms that work in or out of the cloud.

As an aside, Chicago, DMC’s hometown, is a host to one of the Windows Azure data centers. Oh, I also won a very cool MSDN t-shirt in a raffle at the end of the session!

For more information about Windows Azure, check out the Windows Azure training kit.

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