Digital White Papers

7 WWW.ILTANET.ORG | ILTA WHITE PAPER OFFICE 365 Office 365 Solutions Are Changing the Game Areas Office 365 Is Changing the Game » Licensing: Many have felt the not-so-subtle nudging by Microso to get firms to move to an Office 365 subscription. The first step is the licensing model. The good news is that it is possible to change your licensing model and not move from your on-premise solutions or change your locally installed Office applications. The licensing model is quite compelling and worth consideration. Office 365 is licensed per user, not by install. So, as it relates to the locally installed version of Microso Office, historically, one install would be equivalent to one license. With Office 365, each user is entitled to five installs of the Office desktop applications. This change alone is great and really got my aention. This allows a firm to move away from perpetual and Soware Assurance licensing to a per-user subscription. This can also replace the home use program and provide the firm the ability to only license for their current number of firm personnel. Scalability and manageability are two strong arguments for the Office 365 licensing model that benefit the firm AND firm personnel. » Evergreen: IF your firm goes with the Office 365 licensing AND you go with the Office ProPlus Click-to-Run (C2R) version of the Office desktop application suite afforded you with this subscription, THEN you get to experience the game changing evergreen platform of Office. That means you will always have access to the most up-to-date version of the applications. Microso now has a steady stream of feature updates to the Office applications. Updates get distributed based on the branch you have associated with the install, plus your firm can control what updates get distributed and when. If you put an MSI install of Office 2016 next to a C2R evergreen install of Office 2016 when they were first released, you could not tell the difference. Now, there is a large feature set difference. This is the new pace and cadence of change coming from Microso. This change will require firms and their third- party application vendors to plan for the changes. It's a brave new world and we must keep up. The good news is users will experience real benefits from these changes. » Exchange: Exchange isn't new, but the ability to host Exchange in the Microso Office 365 cloud platform is. With hosted Exchange in Office 365, doors open to several new features and functionality such as "Cluer", access to Office 365 Groups, and now Microso Office 365 Teams. These efficiency- and productivity-enhancing features also show up in the user interface (UI) of the C2R version of Outlook 2016, making them easily accessible. Office 365's hosted Exchange platform also includes new modern authentication This is the new pace and cadence of change coming from Microsoft. This change will require firms and their third- party application vendors to plan for the changes. Microsoft has provided a roadmap at https://products.office.com/en-us/ business/office-365-roadmap. This site shows you what is launched, rolling out, in development, cancelled or previously released. And it allows you to filter, search and even download the roadmap. Earlier this year I wrote a short piece on the concept of evergreen technology and explained "Evergreen IT refers to systems on a path of regular updates, and they are perpetually current." Read more in "Evergreen is the New Black" in the Summer Peer to Peer issue. WHAT IS EVERGREEN?

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