South African small and medium-sized businesses can simplify, and reduce the costs, of their office productivity and PC operating systems environments by opting for the newly introduced Microsoft 365 Business subscription plan.
The holistic subscription service, at only $20 per user a month, gives small businesses a one-point solution that covers most of their business needs at an affordable cost.
Microsoft 365 Business bundles together:
* Office 365 Business Premium (Office, Exchange, OneDrive, SharePoint, Skype, Microsoft Teams).
* Windows 10 Business (Upgrade rights to Windows 10 Pro for 7/8.1 Pro licenses).
* Enterprise Mobility + Security (Microsoft Intune, Azure Active Directory Premium P1).
In addition, it includes a centralised administration dashboard, making it simpler for small businesses to manage security groups, user policies, device configuration, software deployment, and other IT admin tasks.
“This new offering from Microsoft is the only platform a small or medium-sized business needs to implement a new IT infrastructure or to modernise an ageing Windows 7 or 8.1 environment,” says Othelo Vieira, Microsoft CSP Product Manager at Tarsus On Demand, a cloud enablement company that helps IT resellers empower their customers to take advantage of the cloud.
“Not only does it reduce the costs for companies with older versions of Windows to upgrade to Windows 10, it also bundles a selection of value-added apps covering a range of basic business needs. For example, it includes tools to help small businesses to manage customer bookings and online meetings, in addition to the full Office suite.”
Available for companies with up to 300 users, Microsoft 365 Business is backed with a 99% uptime service level agreement, a selection of security tools, and Office licences for tablets and smartphones.
Microsoft also recently announced that it has rebranded its “Secure Productive Enterprise” service line as Microsoft 365 Enterprise. Meant for larger organisations, this offering includes Windows 10 Enterprise, Office 365 and Enterprise Mobility + Security in a single subscription. The mobility and security tools include enterprise-grade solutions like identity and access management with Azure Active Directory, Windows Hello and Credential Guard as well as device and app management with Microsoft Intune.
“Microsoft’s subscription services give enterprises the platforms as well as the productivity and collaboration tools they need to empower employees in a single subscription,” Vieira says. “We are seeing great excitement among our resellers and their customers about the cost-savings and simplicity these subscription plans offer to South African organisations.”