Microsoft 365 is a software suite with subscription options for different types of businesses, we can help you get the right package for your business.
What is Microsoft 365 for Business?
In our work with small-to-medium businesses across New Zealand, we receive a lot of enquiries about Microsoft 365 – the most common being “What is it, and should I be considering it for my business?” We’ve helped navigate the setup of Microsoft 365 for businesses in Christchurch, Dunedin, Tauranga and across the country. The majority of these businesses have previously invested in the legacy off-the-shelf Microsoft products available from retailers, so they’re usually familiar with the programmes on offer; in this blog we’ll look to give you a little more background on how Microsoft 365 differs from the Microsoft package you may currently be using.
Microsoft 365 is the subscription version of Microsoft’s long-running Office suite of software. In this Software as a Service model, Microsoft products are accessed online via a subscription with regular payments, rather than being physically bought and installed on individual computers. Microsoft 365 was first launched in 2011, and its sales overtook those of the conventional licence model near the end of 2017. Most of Microsoft’s major competitors in this area have made the move to subscription models, and the current market leader, Google’s G-suite, was developed as a cloud-based solution from the outset. So it’s safe to say Software as a Service has become the norm for office productivity apps.
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So what do you get from an Microsoft 365 business package subscription?
The big 5 Microsoft Suite products need no introduction: Word for word processing, Excel for spreadsheets, PowerPoint for presentations, Outlook for email, and Calendar for organisation.
Depending on your budget and your business needs, you can also select from a range of more specialised apps, including:
Outlook
A personal information manager. Primarily an email application, it also includes a calendar, task manager, contact manager, note taking, journal and web browsing.
OneNote
For taking notes on mobile devices: notes are stored in the cloud and can be retrieved from any other device
SharePoint
For hosting intranet websites for smaller teams or divisions of your company
PowerPoint
PowerPoint is a slideshow presentation program. PowerPoint makes it easy to create, collaborate and present your ideas in dynamic and visually compelling ways.
OneDrive
Microsoft’s cloud storage service, offering users up to 1TB of storage
Excel
A spreadsheet that features calculation, graphing tools, pivot tables and a macro programming language called Visual Basic for Applications.
Teams
A unified communications platform designed as a competitor to services such as Slack
Word
A widely used commercial word processor. Microsoft Word is a component of the Microsoft Office Suite of productivity tools.
Microsoft 365 offers subscriptions at different price points depending on which apps you require and the amount of support you need. So that’s our brief summary of what Microsoft 365 is.
What Microsoft 365 business package is right for my business?
Most medium-to-large businesses will want to use some version of 365’s Business package. Each comes with 24/7 phone and web support, and is licenced for commercial use up to 300 users; the best version for you will depend on your budget and the way your company works. Here’s a brief summary of what you can expect from the various Business Packages: