You’ve heard of Office 365 but you may be wondering what it actually is? Basically at its most basic level its a subscription service to Microsoft Office and/or its hosting platform which allows you to migrate your email to 365. We can look at Office 365 as 2 elements…
Software benefits of 365
The Microsoft Office suite of programs that we are all used to using (Word , Excel, Outlook etc) is available as a subscription. So rather than paying hundreds of £’s to get this software outright you simply pay a set fee either yearly or monthly and get access to the latest version of the Office suite.
Within this model there are multiple subtle types of license with different options for business, personal and education use and each option differs. Some may give more advanced programs such as Microsoft Access or maybe the ability to activate on multiple devices using the same subscription account.
The main benefit here for most users is the relatively low monthly cost to get the latest version of the software. The other benefit is the ability to get access to the latest version.
For example lets say you purchased a Microsoft Office 2016 retail suite last year via the traditional retail method you would have spent anywhere from £100-300 for a single computer copy of the software. Should you decide that actually Microsoft Office 2019 is actually the product you need well that’s another £100-300 – Note this is per computer!
By paying a fee of usually £10-20 a month you will get access to the latest version of the software and typically be ‘allowed’ to install and activate on anywhere from 3-5 devices used by the same user. That makes for quite an incentive.
Email benefits of 365
The other bit of the 365 model is the hosting side of things, This covers a multitude of services such as cloud storage, sharepoint & web services, Azure etc but the most important bit for most people is the email hosting part.
By signing up to Microsoft 365 (depending on which version of subscription you have) you get the ability to link your domain and therefore your email on Microsoft’s email servers.
Microsoft 365 email is based on the Exchange email platform, this type of email has been around for decades so the fundamental system has been around for a while the big difference here is that you are no longer holding your email on a local physical Exchange server and instead you are letting Microsoft take on-board the cost of expensive Exchange servers.
Your subscription fee essentially allows you access to Microsoft’s cloud based Exchange servers.
The benefits of migrating your email to 365
By migrating your email to 365 servers you benefit in a few different ways:
- You get advanced Exchange type email without the huge cost of Exchange server hardware
- Your email is hosted on Exchange server’s managed by Microsoft so you can be assured they are always up to date, fast and secure
- Microsoft’s servers are GDPR compliant so you can be certain your email is securely hosted
- You get a very generous 50GB mailbox allowance (100GB in some instances)
- The use of Microsoft Exchange 365 servers makes setup on devices easy – email address and password is all you need
- Easy to scale, you can add and remove mailboxes and licenses as and when required. Need another alias – 2 sec job!
So now you know what Office 365 is, here’s how we can help
The Red Penguin Group Ltd are experts at migrating email to 365. We have completed migrations for lots of customers over the years and because we are a Microsoft Partner we can get the whole thing done with as little downtime and fuss as possible. All we need is a few details from you and we can manage everything else.
We can host your email on 365 from just £4.50 per month
By having The Red Penguin Group Ltd host your email on Microsoft’s 365 platform you are ensuring you are keeping your email secured on GDPR compliant servers. In addition the platform offers a 99% uptime SLA meaning its incredibly reliable.
As a bonus by moving away from on-premise Exchange servers or even antiquated POP or IMAP you are building resilience into your business. Even in the event of your office being offline (power cut etc) your email will still work! Check out this link detailing some of the resilience built in
If you’re looking to migrate your email to 365, or wish to acquire any additional information about our services, feel free to contact us today through our contact form, or you can call us on 0115 784 8850 or drop us an email at info@redpenguin.it and we’ll do everything we can to help!