Microsoft announced price drops on most Office 365 plans

Microsoft announced price drops on most Office 365 plans. New prices are effective now for new and renewing direct customers. New Prices are as follows:

Office 365 plans

Microsoft Office 365 (Plan E1)                           £5.25 per user license, per month

Microsoft Office 365 (Plan E2)                           £9.00 per user license, per month

Microsoft Office 365 (Plan E3)                         £13.25 per user license, per month
Microsoft Office 365 (Plan E4)                         £14.50 per user license, per month
Microsoft Office 365 (Plan K1)                          £2.60 per user license, per month
Microsoft Office 365 (Plan K2)                          £5.25 per user license, per month
Office Professional Plus (1 Year)                        £8.00 per user license, per month
Exchange Online (Plan 1)                                   £2.60 per user license, per month
Exchange Online (Plan 2)                                   £5.25 per user license, per month
Exchange Online Archiving (EOA)                     £1.95 per user license, per month
Exchange Online Kiosk                                      £1.30 per user license, per month

Lync Online (Plan 1)                                           £1.30 per user license, per month
Lync Online (Plan 2)                                           £3.50 per user license, per month
SharePoint Online (Plan 1)                                  £2.60 per user license, per month
SharePoint Online (Plan 2)                                  £5.25 per user license, per month

Office Web Apps with SharePoint Plan 1            £6.50 per user license, per month
Office Web Apps with SharePoint Plan 2            £9.00 per user license, per month

To see how these prices are compared to old prices visit:
http://www.amintavakoli.com/2012/03/price-drops-on-office365-plans.html

Connect anytime, anywhere with BlackBerry Business Cloud Services for Office 365

BlackBerry Business Cloud Services delivers a simple and affordable way for companies to manage BlackBerry smartphones with Microsoft® Office 365.
BlackBerry Business Cloud Services is available at no additional charge to Microsoft Office 365 subscribers. This secure service, hosted by Research In Motion (RIM), directly links Microsoft® Exchange Online with BlackBerry smartphones to offer reliable, mobile access to synchronized email, calendar, contacts, tasks and memo pads.
From almost anywhere, the intuitive, web-based interface provides the tools administrators need to perform common tasks, password reset or find, lock or wipe lost or misplaced devices.
An integrated single sign-on between Office 365 and BlackBerry Business Cloud Services gives end users online self-service options that help make managing devices more efficient than ever.
Read more:
www.blackberry.com/cloudservices
http://www.amintavakoli.com/2012/01/rim-launches-blackberry-business-cloud.html

Office 365 Customer Solution Case Study - D2E International

D2E International – a lift, escalator and façade access management consultancy – utilises Microsoft Cloud services with Office 365 and Windows Intune to enable a mobile workforce to work collabora­tively and with well supported laptops.

“The move to the Cloud has given us an enterprise level IT business solution with guaranteed service levels that our business can depend on, and with a fixed monthly sub­scription cost.”      Bill Evans, Managing Director, D2E International

Overview

Country: United Kingdom

Industry: Building Management Consultancy.

  

Customer Profile

D2E International, independently owned and formed in 2002, is a lift, escalator and façade access management consultancy. Based in both the North and South of England, and operating nation­wide and internationally with a number of Blue Chip companies, they take pride on delivering the high­est standards of professional service and customer satisfaction.

Business Situation

D2E International conducts consulting assign­ments that require a mobile workforce, with a combination of time spent at the client’s premises, in the office or working from home. 

The work requires continuous collaboration and communications between consultants, manage­ment and back-office staff. Assignments are de­livered utilising a combination of practical experi­ence, defined businesses processes and templates, knowledge databases and document stores.

It is essential that all employees – office based or mobile - have easy to use and reliable access to emails, shared calendars and company documents.

Prior IT Business Solution

Employees utilised laptops and PC’s with a mixture of XP/Vista/Windows 7 and Office 2003 /2007 /2010. The office IT infrastructure com­prised of a wireless network with company data stored on a NAS. When out of the office, em­ployees stored data on their laptops, synchronis­ing and copying it to the NAS when in the office.   

Basic POP email was provided by a hosting company and IT support was provided by an ex­ternal company supplying critical services such as data backups, help desk, etc. But they provided no DR (Disaster Recovery) and SLA’s. 

Major problems included the difficulty of collabo­rating and communicating due to the lack of easy access to company data, especially when out of the office; and the lack of shared calendaring from the basic email solution in use.

There was a loss of productivity from unstable and crashing laptops/ PC’s due to the lack of standard desktop and PC management for anti-spam/anti-virus /patch management.

In summary business terms, the prior IT business solution negatively impacted on productivity and operating efficiency, and the lack of formal SLA’s for data backups, lack of DR (Disaster Recovery) was a major concern for the company’s directors.

IT Business Solution

D2E International decided to appoint an IT strategy consultant to review their business processes and requirements and to recommend IT business solutions that would improve collabo­ration, operating efficiencies and customer service levels.

The IT Strategy Consultant - Peter Alexander Associates- recommended the implementation of Cloud Computing to provide the IT needs of the company. This would also meet one of its key strategic objectives of allowing it to focus its management, employee resources, and capital wholly on its core business activities, rather than being distracted trying to operate and finance its own IT.

After a review of Cloud Computing vendors and their service offerings, Microsoft Office 365 and Windows Intune was identified as providing the best platform for the first phase of a strategic roadmap to move the company to the Cloud for all its IT business needs.

To assist in the design and implementation of the Cloud solution, Pygmalion, a Microsoft Gold Partner was contracted to provide the following services:

• Design and implement a Portal /Extranet based on SharePoint Online to provide collaboration and document management.
• Design and implement a Cloud based archiving solution. 
• Migration of emails to Exchange Online. 
• Deployment of a standard desktop based on Windows 7 Enterprise with Office 2010 Plus and Windows Intune all purchased on a sub­scription basis.
• Configuration of Windows Intune to provide an integrated Cloud based PC management for anti-virus/spam; patch management; remote support.
• Configuration of Blackberry smartphones for mobile access to emails and calendars.
• Provide service desk and support for complete IT and communications infrastructure. 

Benefits

• Increases in productivity and operating efficiency due to improved collaboration and ease of anytime, anywhere access to emails, calendars and company data
• All major IT services provided from the Cloud at a fixed monthly subscription fee giving pre­cisely predictable IT costs.
• All major and critical IT services provided with an enterprise level SLA of 99.9 %.
• Enterprise level, well managed, and reliable PC’s /laptops using Cloud based PC manage­ment.

Contacts and further Information


Call Sales on: 020 7751 8060
Email: solutions@pygmalion.com
Visit Web Site: http://office365mission.co.uk

BlackBerry® Business Cloud Services Feature and Technical Overview

BlackBerry® Business Cloud Services are designed to be a secure link between your organization's cloud-based messaging service and BlackBerry devices. BlackBerry Business Cloud Services can provide mobile access to the messaging, collaboration, and organizer data that are part of your organization's resources. BlackBerry Business Cloud Services supports AES and Triple DES encryption to help protect and ensure the integrity of wireless data that is transmitted between the BlackBerry Business Cloud Services and devices. You can select from more than 50 IT policy rules that you can configure to control the features of the devices that are used in your organization's environment.
At £0 per user per month, businesses can get the security and functionality they expect from RIM® while integrating with Microsoft Office 365.

BlackBerry Business Cloud Services (Beta 1) Feature and Technical Overview

Important information for the coming SharePoint Online service update

Beginning October 20, 2011, and continuing through the end of November, Microsoft will be upgrading the Office 365/SharePoint Online environments. This is part of a planned service update of SharePoint Online. This post will explain the expected experience during the planned downtime and enable you to relay the information in a timely fashion to your end users.

During the upgrade your overall experience will not be affected - all aspects of SharePoint Online will continue to work - with the exception of two known read-only periods during the upgrade that typically last less than 30 minutes. You will be receiving an additional notification 24 to 48 hours prior to your specific read-only window in an attempt to raise further awareness.
For the duration of this read-only window, an end-user will not be able to add any new content, edit or add items to lists, search indexing will be paused, and you will not be able to make changes from your SharePoint Online Administration Center. You can access existing content to view it as is.
A few notes:

• There is little difference in experience for end-users and administrators.
• In addition to the user experience outlined above, Microsoft is introducing an upgraded set of features. See Table 1 for more detail.

We encourage you to raise awareness as is appropriate within your organization regarding this coming read-only impact. If you have any questions, comments or concerns about this upgrade or the impact to your organization, please feel free to contact Microsoft.

Table 1: New features coming to SharePoint Online with this service update:

Feature	Description
Business Connectivity Services (BCS) <WCF Connector> *Enterprise plans only	Enables connecting to external systems via web service based endpoints
External Sharing: Windows LiveID support	Allows Office 365 tenant administrators to invite external users to a site collection. They sign in with a Windows Live ID-based user name and password.
Windows Phone 7 "Mango" (official support and http:// connectivity)	Windows Phone 7.5, codenamed “Mango,” now enables both small business and enterprise Office 365 customers to access SharePoint Online lists and document libraries from their Windows Phone.
Recycle Bin: deleted site self-recovery	Self-service ability to recover sites from a site collection’s recycle bin
Browser support: Internet Explorer 9	Adds official support for the Internet Explorer 9 (IE9) browser
Browser support: Chrome	Adds official support for the Chrome browser

Reference: Mail notification titled "Important information for the coming SharePoint Online service update" by The SharePoint Team received on 14/10/2011

BlackBerry Business Cloud Services for Microsoft Office 365

Open Beta

The general availability of the service is expected to be in January, 2012. BlackBerry is currently accepting participants for Open Beta Program starting in October.

BlackBerry Business Cloud Services provides a secure link between your organization’s Microsoft Office 365 messaging services and BlackBerry smartphones. BlackBerry Business Cloud Services provides mobile access to email, calendaring and organizer data with Exchange Online.

If you are interested in participating in BlackBerry Business Cloud Servies for Microsoft Office 365 Beta you can visit http://www.blackberry.com/beta/businesscloud and nominate your organization for this service.

Things to consider when participating in the open beta program...

• Consider that with any pre-release service there may be occasional service interruptions and maintenance requiring temporary system downtime
• Consider that the open beta program is both a testing ground for you to explore the new features and functionality and for RIM to provide periodic service updates to ensure the service at launch exceeds expectations
• You will have access to BlackBerry's technical support for any issues encountered
• You acknowledge that the beta service is not a finished product and that your interaction does not reflect your experience with the finished product

To enable your Microsoft Office 365 for BlackBerry service:

1. An administrator must login to http://portal.microsoftonline.com and click on Setting up email on mobile phones under Resources
2. Click Enable Hosted BlackBerry® services from Research In Motion®
3. Agree to the information sharing agreement
4. From the Microsoft Online Services Admin Overview, click Manage under Hosted BlackBerry® services from Research In Motion®
5. Once the open beta is live you will be able to configure and activate desired BlackBerry devices

For more information regarding the BlackBerry Business Cloud Services Beta Program please visit https://www.blackberry.com/beta/businesscloud

For more information on how to enable BlackBerry service on your Office 365 account and how to nominate your organization to participate in BlackBerry Beta Program please visit http://www.amintavakoli.com/2011/09/blackberry-bes-for-office-365.html

How BPOS subscriptions will translate to the Office 365 Services

BPOS subscriptions will translate to Office 365 after the transition. The following table shows how this translation is done and how different services will map to the Office 365 services for exisiting customers:

Current BPOS Subscription	New Office 365 subscription
BPOS Standard Suite BPOS Deskless Worker Suite Exchange Online Exchange Online Deskless Worker SharePoint Online SharePoint Online Deskless Worker Live Meeting Standard Office Communications Online	Office 365 (Plan E1) Office 365 (Plan K1) Exchange Online (Plan 1) Exchange Online Kiosk SharePoint Online (Plan 1) SharePoint Kiosk (K1) Lync Online (Plan 2) Lync Online (Plan 1)

The current price for BPOS customers will be maintained through the end of their subscription term when transitioned to Office 365.

Need help with your transition or have questions about pricing?
Call solution sales on +44 (0)20 7751 8060
Or send us an email
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