Email has always been a major mode of communication for all Organizations, big or small and Microsoft Exchange has almost monopolized the business when it comes to Enterprise Email Infrastructure. But with the introduction to Office 365, Microsoft has taken it to a whole new level.
When most organizations, whose email infrastructure is still on-premise, have the latest version of Exchange as Exchange 2010, Office 365 gives the users a rich experience running Exchange 2013 at the backend.
Moreover, the cost of having an on-premise infrastructure not only ends with the hardware and the software components but its continued support. The support and maintenance is actually more costly than setting up the infrastructure and this is where Microsoft has done the trick. They are not only renting out the license but providing absolute support as long as those licenses are valid. They also go on to claim 99.99% service uptime and compensate for anything less than that.
If that is not all, companies can opt with different plans according to their business size. That means, a company with 200 employees for whom, probably having an on-premise infrastructure is way out of their budget, can have the same experience as Exchange users just by buying those user licenses.
On top of that storage and backup were the two issues which have always bothered Administrators managing an on-premise Infrastructure. Well, that’s all gone now since all Office 365 users gets a default mailbox storage of 25 GB. They also get an online archive space of 100 GB above their regular mailbox quota.
The office 365 licenses also come with 5 Office 2013 licenses which can be used on 5 devices. So a user can use one license in his Office PC, one in his home PC, may be another on his ActiveSync handheld and so on.
Another advantage of Office 365 is, users get to use the latest version whenever Microsoft releases one. Microsoft has also tied up with RIM to provide Blackberry services which means, organizations can again pay a nominal fee and have the latest version of BES service without having to purchase the hardware for a BES Server and eventually maintaining it as well.
Apart from this, the cost of security is also another factor which Organizations look into and Microsoft has backed it up with Forefront Online Protection for Exchange or FOPE which acts as the email Gateway and helps in spam filtering and blocking malicious emails.
Thus, the users get the most update OWA, Office Suite, Outlook experience along with getting to use emails on ActiveSync as well as Blackberry Devices.
The organizations on the other hand need not have to bother about email security, backup, storage space, email retention policy, service downtime, and many more.
The different plans which Microsoft has introduced in Office 365 can be found here. The link show how effectively Microsoft has planned these subscriptions to fit the needs of almost all sizes of organizations and that too at a very competitive pricing
With this kind of pricing and features, Office 365 definitely shows how renting a software can be beneficial for both the client and the service provider.