What would it take to get your boss to move to office 365?
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@Minion-Queen said:
It never ceases to amaze me the stupid decisions management make for their IT needs. What would it take to talk your boss into letting you move to a easier to use, manage and support hosted email system?
You need proper buy in presented the proper way from just the right people. Even then, sometimes companies prefer to insource anything solely on principle. Sometimes it's a matter of timing. If you catch a company at a point where it's considering upgrading the existing system, another option may work, but if you miss that window, it's not going to budge. In some cases, a company has the talent and infrastructure in place to do Exchange properly, so making the switch may not be ideal.
What's the specific case you're working on (while withholding enough info to protect the guilty)?
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Presenting Total Cost of Ownership is a big deal. Don't let them focus on the irrelevant per month costs, show them the money that they are losing by being financially reckless by not focusing on the actual money but getting side tracked. And point out that successful enterprises do cost analysis and lean towards lowering risk rather than taking on risk and cost to remain legacy and less nimble.
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I just find O365 really annoying. It's little things that annoy me. I use it for one of our companies and quickly wanted to upgrade the plan. But I couldn't. What other companies refuses to upgrade you? I would have had to cancelled the plan I was on, created a new plan, and done some jiggery pokery to migrate from the old to the new. And O365 is supposed to be hassle free? It sounded like a logistical nightmare at the time, so didn't bother.
Even today, I went onto Microsoft.com to have a look around, and in the FAQs for O365 Small Business it says "Office 365 Small Business supports a maximum of 25 users. If you have more than 25 users or think you will soon you might want to consider Office 365 Enterprise E1.". No mention of Office 365 Midsize Business which supports up to 300 users? Why not? It's just little things like that that annoy me.
Another annoyance, I have to logon to download invoices every month. Occasionally they change the portal, which throws me. And the portal isn't the most intuitive anyway. And we have to pay by credit card, which is a pain, because there is a minimum monthly spend before Microsoft will allow you to pay on account. Why? Little things, I know, but they all add up.
Meanwhile, my onsite Exchange box sits in the corner and just works.
/rant
Saying that, we'll probably replace our Exchange 2010 box with O365 sometime next year.
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@Carnival-Boy there are no upgrade penalties and total flexibility within the enterprise E plans which includes hosted Exchange.
The specific penalty of opting to take a small or mid size business plan is that there are size caps and no flexibility. As an Office 365 partner we always warn people to only look at E plans and ignore that others exist. Like SBS, they are generally just a bad idea.
Stick with E and your concerns go away.
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@scottalanmiller said:
. As an Office 365 partner we always warn people to only look at E plans and ignore that others exist. Like SBS, they are generally just a bad idea.
Indeed. I wish I'd asked your advice at the time! Getting a good partner seems to be key to Office 365. I don't believe any of the Microsoft partners I work with offer Office 365, so I'll need to head to the market to find someone new. That was another point of annoyance: I assumed that my local Microsoft Gold partner could help me out, but it turned out he couldn't. Why?
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@scottalanmiller said:
@Carnival-Boy there are no upgrade penalties and total flexibility within the enterprise E plans which includes hosted Exchange.
The specific penalty of opting to take a small or mid size business plan is that there are size caps and no flexibility. As an Office 365 partner we always warn people to only look at E plans and ignore that others exist. Like SBS, they are generally just a bad idea.
Stick with E and your concerns go away.
Small business plans do not offer service accounts either as far as I can tell.
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Being a Cloud Partner with Microsoft is completely different. We had to go through the total process of signing up and getting our certifications via Cloud Partner Program when we started to resell it. We have separate account managers and technical account managers etc.
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My original reason for asking this question was not due to a specific customer. It was more the what would you need to see to get your boss to migrate. For some it just doesn't make sense from a business or technical prospective and that I can see but there are some where it doesn't make any sense at all from any perspective.
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@minion-queen Really sorry for sending the thread off-track. My boss, the Finance Director, doesn't care and would go with whatever I recommended. I'm lucky like that. He actually prefers the subscription model to perpetual licencing. A lot of other bosses I know have a phobia about "the cloud", which is a common reason for not going with O365. I reckon this phobia is more prevalent amongst non-IT people.
I do have a mild phobia about doing any kind of cloud business with non-European providers, rightly or wrongly.
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@scottalanmiller said:
@Carnival-Boy there are no upgrade penalties and total flexibility within the enterprise E plans which includes hosted Exchange.
The specific penalty of opting to take a small or mid size business plan is that there are size caps and no flexibility. As an Office 365 partner we always warn people to only look at E plans and ignore that others exist. Like SBS, they are generally just a bad idea.
Stick with E and your concerns go away.
Why do they even have the other levels then? Why not just make everything SIMPLE one level, all E with steps on that level. They seem to be adding needless complication or limitations to what, maybe save the customer a few bucks, and make MS have to work that much harder to product two or three products instead of just one GREAT one?
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@Dashrender said:
@scottalanmiller said:
@Carnival-Boy there are no upgrade penalties and total flexibility within the enterprise E plans which includes hosted Exchange.
The specific penalty of opting to take a small or mid size business plan is that there are size caps and no flexibility. As an Office 365 partner we always warn people to only look at E plans and ignore that others exist. Like SBS, they are generally just a bad idea.
Stick with E and your concerns go away.
Why do they even have the other levels then? Why not just make everything SIMPLE one level, all E with steps on that level. They seem to be adding needless complication or limitations to what, maybe save the customer a few bucks, and make MS have to work that much harder to product two or three products instead of just one GREAT one?
Because SMBs desire these things and ask for them. Same as SBS. You can't blame a vendor for offering both a good and a bad product. If the market didn't demand the bad products they wouldn't sell. Microsoft doesn't push, recommend or require in any way that you avoid the E levels and they provide a partner ecosystem to ensure that you get good advice.
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@Carnival-Boy said:
@minion-queen Really sorry for sending the thread off-track. My boss, the Finance Director, doesn't care and would go with whatever I recommended. I'm lucky like that. He actually prefers the subscription model to perpetual licencing. A lot of other bosses I know have a phobia about "the cloud", which is a common reason for not going with O365. I reckon this phobia is more prevalent amongst non-IT people.
I do have a mild phobia about doing any kind of cloud business with non-European providers, rightly or wrongly.
All enterprise email comes from American-based providers for better or worse. Like NTG, Microsoft has a fully European subsidiary. So they are as European as anyone else. But the parents are always American. Email is just an area Europe has not invested in.
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@Minion-Queen said:
Being a Cloud Partner with Microsoft is completely different. We had to go through the total process of signing up and getting our certifications via Cloud Partner Program when we started to resell it. We have separate account managers and technical account managers etc.
That's bad terminology. You can't resell Office 365. NTG is an advisor of Office 365. That is the difference between the programs. Gold partners are part of the reseller program. Premier partners are the gold equivalent in the advisory program.
No matter who your partner is, the service is always direct from Microsoft.
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@Carnival-Boy said:
@scottalanmiller said:
. As an Office 365 partner we always warn people to only look at E plans and ignore that others exist. Like SBS, they are generally just a bad idea.
Indeed. I wish I'd asked your advice at the time! Getting a good partner seems to be key to Office 365. I don't believe any of the Microsoft partners I work with offer Office 365, so I'll need to head to the market to find someone new. That was another point of annoyance: I assumed that my local Microsoft Gold partner could help me out, but it turned out he couldn't. Why?
NTG UK is a British Office 365 partner
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Sold!
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@Carnival-Boy said:
Sold!
@stefuk can assist you with services based in the UK. And @huw3481 is the primary Office 365 technical person there.
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@scottalanmiller said:
@Minion-Queen said:
Being a Cloud Partner with Microsoft is completely different. We had to go through the total process of signing up and getting our certifications via Cloud Partner Program when we started to resell it. We have separate account managers and technical account managers etc.
That's bad terminology. You can't resell Office 365. NTG is an advisor of Office 365. That is the difference between the programs. Gold partners are part of the reseller program. Premier partners are the gold equivalent in the advisory program.
No matter who your partner is, the service is always direct from Microsoft.
Yes, the partner I work with for Microsoft licensing has stated that basically, they get marked as the partner of record on the account, and get their credit or whatever. But all services and such are MS direct.
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Exactly. As the partner we get access to help manage the account, change visibility, ability to escalate issues for support, etc. but the end service and even payments all go to Microsoft. No money goes between the client and the advisor (unless they buy other services of course.)
