Office 365 Licensing Overview (Video)

TRANSCRIPT

Ziad: Hello, everyone, and welcome to our webinars today. Today we’re discussing Office 365 and the multiple licensing options that Microsoft has to offer. So, my name is Ziad Paracha, and I am an account executive at Encore Business Solutions. A little bit about what Encore does. We’re a Canadian-owned business that works all throughout North America and has some international clients as well. And we just marked up our 30-year anniversary this year. So, we’re doing some really, really amazing stuff in terms of diversifying our offerings and what we do. So, from Cloud Adoption, ERP, CRM, Microsoft Dynamics 365 and everything around it, the Power platform, which are some of our couple other series that are coming up as well around Power BI, Power Automate as well as Power Apps. So, if you’re interested in those, make sure you guys register for upcoming webinars as well.

And as far as what we’re going to be kind of covering today, basics around what Office 365 really is, how the modern workplace has come and shaped itself to where we are today and why these offerings are so crucial to every business, as well as some of the major types of licensing options, which are within our business licensing for Essentials, Business, and Premium. These are kind of our more common type of licensing that small and medium-sized businesses kind of go for as well as our Enterprise-level licensing which includes the E1, E3, and the E5 licenses, what differences there are between these licenses as well as how we can provision them for you as well. So, really, you know, for large businesses with different offerings as you go up the tiers for licensing.

So, let’s talk a little bit about the changing modern workplace that we live in. The idea that most, you know, kind of social interactions at work as well as professional interactions have now become on multiple devices, whereas it used to be just, you know, you kind of knock on someone’s office’s door and you’d kinda be able to have that conversation or a direct phone call or email has now really transformed to using multiple tools. In fact, there’s four times as many devices per user, per individual, you know, in the office space. You can have, you know, your phone, your tablet, a desktop, and so on and so forth. And you utilize all of those to kind of get work done.

There’s a diverse amount of people that are working together. It’s actually the first time ever you will see in a workforce, there are five different generations that are working together with different mentalities, different objectives, different type of methods of communication and collaboration, but really a lot of different ideas and methods to kind of get work done efficiently as well. So, productivity has kind of changed as well from where we used to be just kind of one desktop per user, and you kind of login to do your work and then have your life at home and do everything else you would do on a regular basis. Now you can work from home, you could work remotely, you know, anywhere else around the world and not be limited to just an office space.

Lastly, a lot of team-based and collaborative-based teams have been formed, individuals due to the market and the amount of things that the generations are wanting to work on, there’s twice as many teams as there used to be. So, a lot of teamwork has been happening, a lot of roles have been happening as well. And what that means is now a person who has one role or one title is doing, you know, jobs of two or three different types of roles. So, very much of a diversity within the form of employment as well. So, 80% of the employees spend their daily life or daily work life, at least collaborating with other people. That’s huge.

What does that look like for us today? Well, if you look at the amount of technologies that are, you know, on the rise, 71% of small, medium-size businesses believe that actually mobile applications will replace all traditional solutions in the near future, and that was two years ago. So, this is projected to be this year. And if you look at the trajectory from two years ago to now, the amount of Power Apps that have kind of formed, the amount of solutions that are app-based have really started to evolve and basically revolutionize the way we work, 2.5 million small and medium businesses use web conferencing. So, that’s a lot of businesses that would utilize solutions like Microsoft Teams or formerly Microsoft Skype for business and things like that to kind of communicate, you know, with employees and clients and people around different areas geographically. 3.5 million small, medium businesses use instant collaborative apps. And that was in 2008. So, that number has exponentially increased. Now, 2020, with the new year, we’ll have more data on that as well.

So, you know, what’s the significance of all this? Why is this important for us to capture here and for me to be able to share these data with you is because the Office 365 platform and the way that it kind of is innovative in the cloud has got the ability to cater to all of those different changes in the modern desktop, in the modern kind of work life that people have. So, you have, you know, your typical Word, Excel, PowerPoint, and the productivity suite. And then you’ve got all these additional mobile applications, you’ve got additional services that are, you know, cloud-based services. And what that means basically with Office 365 in the cloud is you can have mobile access and edit the data that you have online.

So, you no longer have to come to the office and log into the one desktop that you’ve been assigned to be able to get your work done, or now you can do is you can be on the go, you can be on your way to the airport, you could be on a flight and still work, and, you know, as long as you have internet access you are able to log into all of your data and work. And then when you don’t have internet access, you could still work, and as soon as you get some network, it realtime kind of synchronizes and backs up that stuff back onto the cloud for you to keep updated files. So, you no longer need, you know, to be updated because the Office 365 is always updated.

There’s no need for upgrades, no need to get the newer Office version of your Home, Professional, Business, or anything like that. It will constantly give you updates inclusive in the price that you pay on a subscription basis, which we’ll talk about later when we get to licensing. And you no longer have to now worry about version control either. I mean, you don’t have multiple files of the same thing with minor changes where you lose track of which PDF or which document you are still working on, when you are collaborating, right? So, these kinds of tools are all there available for us to be able to utilize on a day-to-day basis.

Then you’ve got, of course, a solution with Office 365 that is very scalable. You can utilize the business licenses, you know, up to a certain amount of users, which I’ll share with you as well as, you know, I’ve seen larger businesses with 300 users also use business licenses, or at least have a mixed variety of the different licenses for their users depending on the need of that individual and how they work. As well as you can upgrade or downgrade any of those licenses. So, let’s say today you wanna choose Business Essentials, and tomorrow the need comes for Business Premium, at no added cost or admin fees, you would be able to upgrade and downgrade that, you know, right away and seamlessly get your data and access as well. So, let’s talk a little bit more about what that feels like.

So, within the Office 365, one of the major wins, in my opinion, is the cross-platform experience that you get. What that really means is you get all of your content, the experience that you would get on your desktop, you know, you would be able to get that experience on your phone, on your tablet, as well as you can have up to 15 different devices with that one user. So, it’s still one-to-one mapping of users. However, I can log in to 15 different devices. So, that could be five different laptops, five different PCs and tablets, five different smartphones. You know, that really gives me the power to work. And I’ll give you a story here.

One of our colleagues in the past had a laptop that just stopped working. I don’t know if they had a Microsoft product or not, but it just stopped working. It was, you weren’t able to log in, they were having issues, the screen went blank, and now, you know, in the traditional way of things, you would have just not been able to work. You would have just pen, and paper, and a pad, and that’s all you would be able to work through. The simple solution with Office 365 was he logged into another, you know, spare computer that was lying around, went onto the portal and was able to access all of his information and still attend all of his meetings that he had planned out without any cancellation. So, that is the power of the cloud. That is the power of cross-platform experience and the ability for you to be able to review documents on the go, create collaborative content on the go, right? Be able to prioritize how you work and where you work, when you work, and still get work done. So very, very powerful kind of advantage to being on Office 365.

So, just a recap I guess of some of the advantages on top of, we’ve talked about flexibility. We’ve talked about the cost-effectiveness. We had another client that was paying about $185,000 per year to a third-party IT company contractor. The most common issue that was raised up for their support was, “How do I change my password?” Or, “Can we get… Can we reset a password?” Or, “I forgot my credentials.” Those were the common, common questions that you’re paying $185,000 for per year. And for the same amount of users in that company, the Office 365 solution came out to be about $25,000 per year. So, significant cost savings.

There are other companies that I have seen who had internal IT staff that they were paying a couple hundred thousand dollars a year. And, you know, with the power of the cloud, and the admin controls and rights, and other features that you can own as a administrative user, you were able to do more than part of their job, obviously, right? Now, I’m not trying to get the IT people out of business. We have IT people as well, but a lot of that job can be transferred now. Like I mentioned, there’s multiple roles that, you know, in the modern role that people are working in with the Office 365 with Microsoft 365, with the power of the cloud, you can actually reduce that cost significantly as a business.

Reliability. Of course, Microsoft guarantee and say 99.9% uptime guarantee. And you know, it’s in the SLAs and they put the money where their words are for that. It’s accessible like we mentioned. And of course, secure. And we’ll talk about security kind of in each tier of the licensing that we’re about to go to in the next couple slides here as well about how secure and how you can add on more security to your licenses such as Enterprise-level security, or what they call Enterprise Mobility and Security, EMS, type solutions or add-ons to your license as well.

So, just a basic run-through for those who really have not used multiple Office products. I’ll give a high-level overview, very, very quick introduction to some of these applications. The first being SharePoint Online. Now, SharePoint, I’ve seen, you know, some clients, traditionally, that have used the first couple versions of SharePoint when it first launched to have some battle wounds and scars. And those same users now are using SharePoint and, you know, in 2019 and 2020, have seen a significant amount of improvement and have actually turned over to using SharePoint as a fully integrated and optimized tool for their project sites.

So, what is SharePoint Online really great for? It’s really a secure place to create those teams or project sites and store, organize, and share information from any device. And you can collaborate with colleagues and partners and customers, you can create internal sites that you can use just for onboarding or HR-related solutions or project-based. Really, I would say this is a hub for your organization. So, as an organization, the strategy can be SharePoint. And of course, it’s different a little bit from each business. But generally speaking, that’s the idea. For OneDrive for Business, again, another very powerful tool which we, you know, as best practices would say, “This is probably one of those tools you would like to keep as a personal storage device.” If you’re working on a document, upload it on the cloud storage for OneDrive for Business. You’ve got 1TB of personal cloud storage that you can access from anywhere and synchronize with your Macs or PCs for, you know, offline access as well.

So, what that means is if you’re working on a document, put it up on OneDrive until you polished it up and then share it either on SharePoint, or what I would recommend more so is Microsoft Teams, and I’ll talk about that next and how that could be utilized. So, really, really great tool for office documentation in real-time, collaboration, securing content, and storing that content securely, synchronizing and sharing files from any device, OneDrive is your go-to application for that. And it does, you know, synchronizes and stores stuff. If you accidentally delete files and stuff, there’s archives and so on and so forth. But we’ll talk more about that if there’s any questions around that as well.

Microsoft Teams. Now, this is, you know, Microsoft’s baby right now. For the last two years, they’ve invested a lot of love in this particular application. It was formerly Skype for Business. Now, Skype for Business is not dead, it hasn’t been abandoned. It’s just been… The features of what Skype for Business had have now been adopted inside what we call Microsoft Teams. And it still does, you know, functions of Microsoft Skype for Business, but now it has a lot more and it’s in the platform. So, Skype for Business for example, would connect via instant message, voice or video calls, sharing screens, you know, availability statuses were on there, so you could let people know you’re busy or presenting, online, offline. You could share your presence with IM and things like that, you could do…you know, basically, those were the general kind of aspects of Skype for Business. All of those are still embedded in Microsoft Teams.

Now, what you can do more with Microsoft Teams is exactly what the title suggests, is create actual teams that you can work with. Now, I mentioned there are, you know, two times as many teams being worked on, and 80% of the time for most people on a day-to-day basis is working collaborative in teams. So, you can imagine the power of teams and the celebration that Microsoft goes through the amount of users that they have on this platform. So, create different teams, you can create different projects. You can have a whole bunch of add-ins in the store to be able to work on the platform for teams. You could add Power BI in there, CRM integrations, there’s actually an add-in for that. You can use, you know, e-signature stuff. There is chats and bots using AI technology within Teams.

So, really what Microsoft is trying to do with this platform is make it the go-to platform, meaning as soon as you launch your desktop in the morning, that is the application you can work with. Recently, I did an experiment of trying to basically only work with Teams for majority of my day. And to be honest, 80% of the things I could do from within Teams. I could schedule my meetings from Teams, I could look at my calendar, I can send, you know, notifications, I can chat, I can call externally and within the Team, I could do a whole bunch of things, have access, you know, like, YouTube and news feeds, and so on and so forth, Twitter, etc., from Microsoft Teams. So, if you aren’t using it currently or even if you are using it but not to its full capacity and wanna learn more about it, you know, feel free to shoot me an email and I’ll share my details with you after and we can kind of do a free 30-minute consultation for all the people on this webinar today.

Next, let’s talk briefly about Exchange Online, the reason being is because some of these licenses don’t include Exchange Online and some of them do. So, Exchange from a very basic kind of license includes 50GB of mailbox storage. Now, you cannot have Exchange as well if you have your own kind of domain, then we can kind of work with as well. Or you could have this included in your licensing as well. So, really, it helps ensure that your business email is always available and, you know, your users can be productive and be able to work…you know, rest assured that their data and your organization’s data is protected. And it lets you kind of tailor to each user’s experience and really move, you know, to the cloud easily if you’ve got Exchange right now as well. So, both online and on-premise is there.

One really cool kind of application that I think is left out quite often amongst other ones like Delve and Projects or even other things that are included in your licenses. I would say Yammer would be one of those applications that I think can be used more for collaboration purposes. We see from a trends perspective, a lot of the younger generation using stuff like this because what it really is and how, you know, people have summarized it as is, it’s the Facebook for business. So, you can share content, open ideas, and so on and so forth, collaborate a little bit more socially and still kind of have a borderline professional versus social. You can upload stuff. There’s actually really, really cool community groups or, you know, Yammer teams that have kind of been created that have powerful amount of knowledge, a wealth of knowledge, and that’s all searchable, right? And you can search that through Yammer. And that’s included in your licenses as well.

So, let’s dive right into what we have here. So, Office 365 Business Essentials is really a web-based only. So, basically there’s only web versions of Word, Excel, PowerPoint for PCs, Macs, mobiles, etc. So, you can only access the applications like Outlook, Excel, PowerPoint, Word, Access is only for PCs, if you have internet. Now, services are there like for Teams, OneDrive, SharePoint, and Exchange are still all there. You can still get that 1TB of the cloud storage. You can, you know, host meetings online, you can still have that experience, but your applications will be on apps.

Now, this is…you might be saying, “Hey, that’s not really a great solution,” or some might say, “This is perfect for me.” A lot of clients use this kind of license especially if they’re always in the office, so they’re always gonna have a secure internet connection. Or controversially, if you are using multiple devices or going…you know, always on the go. So, if you’re on the field a lot of the times and things like that, some people will actually use the online versions more with data and things like that. But that’s kind of a personal preference and depends on the business needs. But Business Essential is the cheapest of those licenses. In Canadian dollars, it’s about currently $6.40 per user per month. Now, these prices can change. So, definitely reach out to me if you need it urgently, we’ll get the licenses. Otherwise, we can always inform you of any price changes.

Office 365 Business is the next tier up from essential. So, it kinda has, you know, the power of Essentials, but less on the services side. So, you still have your Outlook, Word, Excel, PowerPoint, Access, and you can actually download them, meaning there are desktop versions of these applications, but you only get 1TB of OneDrive cloud storage. You don’t get Teams, you don’t get Exchange, you don’t get SharePoint. Now, again, you’re saying, “Hey, that’s great. No, Microsoft is really trying to play with us. They’re only giving us half the things in these licenses.” And you know what? It kind of is.

But if you think about why this is like that is because they’ve given a unique experience for each one of the business types. These are common, common type of business licenses that we provision all the time for businesses that maybe need the downloadable applications but maybe they’re not using, you know, Microsoft Teams, or they already have an Exchange, or an email that they like to use. So, basically your business email is not included in this license. But, you know, you could still use OneDrive to store content. So, that’s practically what you need these applications for on a day-to-day basis. It is a business license, right? And these are about…you know, they ring you about $11 per user per month, Canadian.

The next license is basically the combination of both of them and is the highest level of license for business licenses, and that’s the Business Premium license. It has the desktop versions of both the applications and the services and it gives you everything. So, you have, you know, 50GB of mailbox and email domain that’s custom to your business. You can use Teams, you have OneDrive, you have all the different type of things. And what else it gives you is the cross-platform experience that we’re mentioning. So, the ability for you to log in to several different devices with the same user credentials. So, amazing kind of feature, ramped up security is the same on all of these as well. There is, you know, IP on them, there is advanced protection, and multifactor authentication. All of these security features are also part of this, and I can get more granular with the security as well. Just reach out to me and we can set out some conversation there.

The Enterprise-level licenses, there’s really three major ones. The E1 is the lightest of the few. So, this version of the application includes the email and the calendars via Microsoft Exchange, but they also have social applications like Yammer and things like that for communication, team sites are there with SharePoint, OneDrive is there, you know, with 1TB, again. There is Delve, like I mentioned, not many people really use this application, but Delve is a great content discovery or search engine almost for your content as well. There’s other applications that are not listed on this, such as StaffHub and Planner, helps you to manage your tasks daily. For example, Microsoft Stream is included in all Enterprise-level licenses as well, which is kind of like your video streaming type of application.

And then, of course, it also has the Office applications as well. So, all of your applications, in this particular case, these applications are web-based in E1. And the E3 and E5 will have the downloadable version as well. This doesn’t allow, again, those applications like Outlook, Word, Excel, PowerPoint, and OneNote to be downloaded on your desktop. So, these are mobile devices, you can use it on smartphones, tablet, etc., or on any desktop but online, on the internet. You still have the cross-platform experience with all Enterprise-level licenses. So, you can log into five different phones, five tablets, five different desktops and you wouldn’t have any concerns.

The E3 is the next one down here, and we’re running a little bit short on time, so we’re gonna run through the E3 here. But basically you can download the apps. There’s not much of a difference from E1 to E3 aside from the fact that there is added security and compliance tools here. So, if you have more restrictions or more kind of compliance that you need to have more audits, things like that, you know, you have legal hold, you have data loss prevention, you have a lot more that comes with this E3 license on top of everything that you have in E1 as well.

So, with E3, you still have the 1TB by default, but you do have the ability to increase that to 5TB or even 25TB if you need, right? Mostly users that we deal with, very few people have actually needed to extend that Drive storage to 5TB or 25TB. If you have a lot of pictures or architectural documents that are, you know, pretty major inside other applications that you run that produce quite large-size files, then that would be something that you might need. So, data loss prevention basically allows you to comply with business and industry standards and regulations, protects sensitive information. Very, very good for preventing data leaks outside of the organization. Now, this data loss prevention is not included in E1. It’s only included from E3 and above. So, it also has other data management functions like archiving, rights management, document-level encryption. There is advanced emailing, access control. There is intelligent searches and discovery features that you can also have from the content of Office applications, right?

And lastly, you have the E5, which is really the license on steroids, I guess. It’s everything combined together. If you wanna come in today and you say, “I want something that has everything that Office 365 has to offer me. I want the security, I want the applications, I want the services, I want the reporting tools, I want phone call systems, I want analytics. I want all of those things.” This would be your go-to license. And again, you can add on other things too as well. So, this has everything that E1 and E3 has plus even more advanced security, some analytical features, reporting features, and voice capabilities. So, you basically have the advanced security information protection in this license as well. You know, basically avoids threats like phishing threats and zero-day malware attacks and things like that. So, E5, you always stay protected from threats, from attachments, and links like that. And it kind of actually helps you stay aware and still be able to learn through those threat or breaches.

It has analytical tools. For example, it has MyAnalytics included in that, which is a really great tool to kind of adjust to the work that you do, and see how you’ve performed, and where you can kind of be more productive, who you’ve worked with more, collaborative, etc., etc. And then the reporting tools, which is Power BI Pro is included in this for data analysis and visualization. So, creates, you know, business-intelligent-type visualizations and dashboards for you to use for reporting and things like that. We have more webinars and events coming up around the Power platform. Power BI is one of the tools that are in Power platform. And if you want more information about that as well, reach out and we can even do demos and things like that as well.

So, other additions in the E5. You have Advanced eDiscovery, you have access controls, control encryption keys, advanced threat protection, threat intelligence, cybersecurity, you know, and proactiveness insight as well. So, a lot of actionable insight is given to you. There’s PTSN conferencing capabilities available as well, which is where the voice capabilities come in, where you could do domestic kind of calls, and add on other plans as well if needed. There is advanced data governance and even the customer lockbox in the E5 plan. So, really, I think it’s a really stacked up kind of license and lots there. There are users that use any of these licenses, but you know, don’t utilize everything that’s on there. And, of course, we encourage any sort of help that we could do to train users on that, we will, right? So, that’s all that.

So, in summary, Office 365 really allows you to work the way that you want, right? It gives you all the kind of information that you need at your hands when you need it. The licensing options are there to kind of suit yourself. So, if one day you wanna be on business, and the other day, you scale-up and you’re growing and you wanna now be an enterprise-level organization, that cutoff there is about 300 users. So, if you’re anything above 300 users, you can’t do Business Premium. You have to go into an E1, E3, or E5 license. Anything below 300 users, you could do anything, really. That being said, we do have users that only have a couple users and they’re still using the enterprise-level solution because that now they don’t have to worry about, you know, malware attacks or antiviruses and things like that that they would have to pay for additionally, it’s included in their license.

So, that’s the new Office. The idea is to worry less, work easier, and work together. And these are the kind of different added features on that, like, Multi-Factor Authentication and Hello which is a single sign-on type of feature that’s available for you to use. If there are any things specifically within these licenses that you’d like to see a demo on, or more information for, or have increase, please reach out to me with the following email and/or number and I will be more than happy to answer any questions as well as go through your unique business scenario and how it is that Encore can help in your journey to the cloud or licensing options as well. Thank you so much. And if there are any questions immediately, I’ll take those. Otherwise, we will chat offline.

Melissa: Hi, Ziad. I don’t see any questions coming in, but the question pane is open if anyone wants to throw any in there.

Ziad: Fantastic. And we just went over the time a little bit here, so if it is something that you guys have questions later on, shoot me an email and we will be more than happy to help out in your business development and requirements.

Melissa: Absolutely. And this will be recorded and sent out to everyone who registered as well.

Ziad: Fantastic. Hey, thanks so much guys. Have a great rest of your day.