Office 365

Office 365 or pretty much any kind of software that is service based or cloud based solution, there is really four main key features or key benefits it brings to your organization by moving in this direction. Hands down, the big one that everyone is interested in or the first two is obviously the mobility factor and productivity and actually moving your now system or let's say you adopt SharePoint and you put all your documents in there or if you move to Zero or Sales Force or something like that. Moving your core business elements into that kind of cloud environment where it is centralized, it's available from multiple devices and just using the web browser. It really gives you the ability to allow your staff to be more mobile and naturally that translates into productivity. The fact that they can pick up their tablet, they can work on the road, they can work from a client's house, they can directly access things on the go. It has some really great productivity gains there through that mobility element. The other two points we've got in there, the first one is continuity and what I mean by this is that in a traditional sense where we'll use the host exchange or the email component of our Office 365 as an example for this and traditionally when you wanted to achieve this, you would do this with a Microsoft product called small business server or SBS for some of you who may have heard the abbreviation for it. What that will do is you actually set this up in your office and have your email hosted from your server that lived in your office, which for some people that is definitely the way they want to go but the challenge you have with that, and this is especially if you have people working remotely or if you have multiple office locations is that the internet connection in the head office was ever to go down or the server was to fall over in that head office, you've got an outage of your internet for your email so people can't access their emails or potentially can't access documents as well. They are actually moving this element of your IT environment once again outside to a neutral location. It just means that these services, whether it be document mail or the CIM on your accounting package, it just means that those elements are going to continue to function and continue to be available to people whether it be via 3G connection or a 4G connection or working from home or working from another office. It just means these services will continue to be available in the event that you have an outage at the head officer server. There are some really nice obviously advantages of having that in place as well. The last point I've got down is just the agility and it really comes down to kind of combining those three elements and being able to service your clients in a more agile fashion and being able to be more responsive, being able to take your systems out on the site or take your systems out to someone's home that you may be working with and actually it leverages your tools better and adopt methodology that are ready to service your clients in a more timely fashion as well. Even the cloud based stuff, not only Office 365 really has some powerful ways of achieving them as well so you should really take them into consideration. In the less camp, probably one of the main benefits of 365 and all this software as a service based products is they really give you access to this enterprise, greater infrastructure, without you having to make the capital investment yourself, without having to go out and set up the servers and set up the software to kind of create this environment. You are going to Office 365 for your software service provider and they are providing this to you excluding the donation program but they are providing this to you on a monthly pay, use it for a month basis. The whole concept of that is, you know, your IT becomes very much a utility. It is similar to your [inaudible 00:14:07]. You get to come in, you get to flick your light switch in the morning, the power just works and if something happens to the transformer or the equipment in the power station where they are generating the power, it's the provider's responsibility to get that up and running and to keep that running and to keep that service maintained. It's very similar in approach with any of the software as a service of the Office 365 client stuff in the market. What does that mean for you? Well, you know really it's all about, you know, not only reducing the complexity of your IT environment in your organization, but that also has the ability to potentially reduce some of the administrative overheads of managing and maintaining that environment but also has the ability to potentially reduce the down time that you would experience from running your own on premises sort of solutions. Microsoft has made significant investments in the Office 365 platform and they provide this solution to thousands of businesses all around the world so they have definitely set up a solution, a back end to the solution to be designed to have multiple layers of redundancy and to really support quite a large client base. You get to take advantage of that and leverage that kind of investment without having actually to spend the money on the actual hardware or the software up front, which is fantastic. It's really great for anyone with a small or medium space. It gives you that kind of client capability without the [inaudible 00:15:42], which is fantastic. Some of the other questions that we get a lot and I thought I'd take some time just to address is about Office 365 and IT strategy and questions like you know, when should I adopt Office 365 or how does Office 365 fit into my [inaudible 00:16:01] strategy and what are the caveats? What are the things that I need to be mindful of and consider if I'm considering moving to 365 or some other cloud-based software as a service solution as well? There is a lot of reasons to consider it. In my eyes, I think a rather good time to kind of sit down and look at it is if you are in one of these situations that we've got this, you know, if you are in a situation where you do have to potentially spend some money on your IT environment whether it is replacing servers or updating software or something like that. 365 does have some really great abilities to offset some of that capital expense of a pending upgrade. If you are in that position, definitely I think it is worthwhile considering or talking to your IT partner about it to see if they think it fits into your overarching kind of IT strategy requirements. A couple of other points of [inaudible 00:16:59] if you are looking for a way to potentially lower your ongoing maintenance and support costs. Leveraging 365 does have the ability to offset some of that cost from a maintenance point of view and potentially a support point of view as well. It can be a really good facilitator for that. The last point is obviously if you are looking for a way to improve your efficiency through mobility so looking to get some gains and give you a realization or give you a start with the ability to be more agile and to be able to go out into the community and to do work and access your systems, utilizing solutions like 365 allow you to really achieve that at a pretty cost effective manner and achieve it in a way where it's going to be a viable solution even for the guys who are potentially working on a 3G or 4G connection from their tablet or their phone. It definitely is a really good time to kind of start asking the questions and looking into a bit further if you are in [inaudible 00:17:59]. Some things to be mindful of and to consider, as we spoke about, there are some really good benefits of moving to 365 or the cloud but some things to kind of talk over not only with your board or your senior management team but also discuss with your technical partners is obviously from a data storage location, is there any legal obligations for you to have your data stored inside a [inaudible 00:18:32]. For anyone who is not aware at the moment, 365 do utilize the [inaudible 00:18:37] data center to service Australian customers. It is a question you do want to ask and I definitely suggest asking it and investigating it really early in your [inaudible 00:18:47] of kind of evaluating the cloud is just to make sure that this particular provider you are looking at moving to, just to identify where their data center is and from a legal point of view if you do have any of those legal obligations, which would potentially stop you from being able to leverage that. Application dependency is also very important. This is definitely one to get your technical advisor involved in. There are a lot of rogue applications or serve based applications such as CRMs or accounting packages or donation management packages or event management packages, which will actually require some level of kind of file access or email access. Depending on what level of integration these applications have with those elements, there may be potential road blocks there, which would stop you from moving your email or moving your file shares or your file storage from outside the traditional sever environment. Once again, another really good thing to kind of identify in the beginning and really get your technical advisor or your internal resource or an external resource, get them involved and say look, we were considering moving down this path, can you give us some advice for any applications about what we're using and how we're using it and just have a look at if there are any dependencies, which potentially stop us from adopting this new cloud based technology. The third one I've got there is internet connectivity, which is hands down also very, very important if you are looking at any type of cloud based service regardless of being [inaudible 00:20:24] as a service or traditional kind of remote desktop environment or virtual server environment where you are actually dialing in. You want to have a look at your internet connection and once again speak to your tech or speak to your IT coordinator and just ask the questions and make sure are they happy with the performance with your current connection and is it stable. Ask them do they have many outages. Also, have a chat with the guys who look after it and say you know, we are looking at adopting some cloud based technology, what is the availability like in the areas that our staff work in. You want to kind of once again kind of take that off early in the piece just to make sure that there is a certain level of connectivity and it's of a decent level, not only in your satellite offices but maybe in some of the locations that your staff has to go out and work with in the community just to make sure that they can get a reasonably good 3G or 4G connection and they will just be able to access some of these tools that are going to be hosted externally. The next three points I've got there is solution design. There are many different ways that you can kind of integrate 365 into your IT strategy or into your IT environment. There are some organizations who can go completely to the cloud and actually transition to a model where they don't have any other server infrastructure whether it be on premises or virtual servers hosted in a data center to support their needs and sometimes there are organizations out there who can actually achieve the outcomes they need to actually achieve by just using SharePoint and Link and using the Office 365, the built in solutions for kind of security and management around documents and stuff like that. Some people do tip that box but the flipside of that client is there are situations where for whatever reason, whether it be because they are using the legacy application or have particular requirements around [inaudible 00:22:28] security where you may have to go to what's called a hybrid model where you actually are using some software as a service based service but you are also using an on site or on premises service solution to support whether it be as kind of a security measure to manage the security of your work stations. A really popular kind of industry who uses this type of design is anyone who does a lot of high level or a lot of design work so people who use auto CAD or photoshop and stuff like that. Being that these files are quite large, generally speaking, a lot of these guys actually have kind of a basic server on site or even like some of these guys will just have what is called a NAZ, which is for anyone who hasn't heard of that before, it's a network that attaches to a device and it's basically a hard drive, which plugs into your networking office and it gives you kind of a shared drive that anyone can access. Storing those rather large file types locally on your network just means that the guys who have to work within it on a daily basis, just have a bit more of a positive experience. Once again from an application point of view, you may have an old CRM or an accounting package that you are very tied to and you are able to move to a software as a service replacement or unable to actually move that to a hostess solution and you may be required to run the on premises server so once again, it's a really good question for your technical advisor. The point of access hardware is another point I've got there and that's sort of just identifying the devices that your staff are going to work from. If you are going to be moving them as [inaudible 00:24:09], you are going to be using 365 and using SharePoint and stuff like that, you want to have a bit of a look to see what they are using whether it be laptops, desktops, is there an opportunity to potentially do some consolidation of devices. A lot of organizations I've seen over the years have kind of transitioned from a model where your staff member will have a desktop or have a laptop and as recently as well have a tablet and one of the really nice things about these kind of web based or browser based technologies is that you get that level of access and that level of security without potentially having to work from a full PC device. Some of the devices which recently came out a year or so back is the Microsoft Surface and they've got a couple of different reiterations of that which they've become a device, which is not only a tablet but it can be used as a laptop or if you have a docking station, it can be even used as a full desktop. That's something that we've been actually as a business embraced as well. A lot of our management team now work off Microsoft Surfaces as their primary device, myself included. When I'm out and about working, I come into the office and I plug my surface into a docking station, which gives me access to two screens, a keyboard and mouse, ethernet and so on but when I travel around and I go to my appointments and go to see people, I just carry this thing around and I use it both as a tablet and more so in the laptop kind of functionality as well. There is a really good opportunity there if you are looking at going down this path to potentially get some efficiency gained there with your hardware as well. Second to the last point I've got up there to talk about is identifying your staff's skill level and taking the time to understand if your staff are comfortable with off web based technology but also to, excuse me, [inaudible 00:26:04] just popped up on the screen. I [inaudible 00:26:06] Ross. So, to take the time to identify if your staff is actually comfortable with web based technology but also, you know, identifying what level of training may be required if you are going to implement some of these solutions into the environment. Obviously implementing the products like SharePoint and Link do require a bit of training to get used to obviously how to navigate and how to get the best out of them but if you are going to be integrating [inaudible 00:26:31] solutions into the environment as an example, dynamics, which is the Microsoft cloud based CRM or sales force or zero and taking the time to actually identify where the staff for that or where their kind of skill level is at with this kind of web based technology and planning ahead for that and actually identifying what level of training will be provided and definitely trying to get that training to them prior to actually cutting into these systems in a live environment. From an adoption point of view, if you can get your staff comfortable with it and familiar with it before you do that [inaudible 00:27:07] and go live with these systems, you are just going to find that the take up rate of web based technology is going to be a lot higher and you are potentially off setting any productivity loss or minimize the productivity loss of adopting these new solutions as well. Last but not least, I do want to touch on migration budget. It is definitely one thing to consider with any cloud based solution, not just 365 but if you are going to go down the path of investing in a new technology or moving to a new technology, you really want to make sure and from a financial point of view but also from a technical point of view that you've taken the time to scope out the migration correctly by looking at things like training, internet, solution design and making sure you've got a budget there to support a successful outcome. Ideally, you don't want to cut corners because there are situations I've seen where organizations have gone down the path of adopting a new cloud based solution and because they didn't have the budget at the time or didn't go through the process of kind of identifying their requirements in the beginning, they didn't invest in things like getting staff trained or understanding the staff skill level or understanding what their full requirements are and unfortunately I've definitely come across situations in the last four years where people have adopted something that they are not necessarily using to the best capacity or are not making the most out of the solution because they overlooked something in that earlier stage. I really encourage you to definitely take the time to define and understand your requirements wholly and make sure you do have a budget per say to actually dedicate to [inaudible 00:28:54] but doing it in a way where you've tipped off all your requirements and your staff are going to get that level of training and advice around the solutions that we're moving to as well.