Microsoft Inspire (the premier partner event) is an event full of surprises and new announcements from Microsoft and this year was no exception. Satya Nadella announced Microsoft 365, a blend of Office 365, Enterprise Mobility and Windows 10. Enhanced with better security features, Microsoft is claiming that it will be a complete, secure and intelligent solution set to empower employees.

Satya mentioned that Microsoft 365 is a brilliant opportunity for partners to grow as well. It will drive the growth with 64,000 cloud partners (a list that is fast growing) to distinguish their offerings, help their sales processes and improve their revenue.

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Why is it important to empower employees?

It is important to empower employees as the workplace is changing, and so are the employee expectations. Enterprises are becoming more diverse with workforce spread across the globe and distributed teams. So enterprises wish to transform to a new and modern workplace with more connected employees. There are more than 100 million commercial users of Office 365 and as high as 500 million Windows 10 users, which gives Microsoft a unique position to help Enterprises to empower their employees. With that thought Microsoft 365 Enterprise and Microsoft 365 Business was introduced. Since August 2017, there are two plans from Microsoft available, which are Microsoft 365 E3 and Microsoft 365 E5.

Microsoft 365 Enterprise is built on the Secure Productive Enterprise, which grew a lot last year. The Enterprise version of Microsoft 365 will replace Secure Productive Enterprise, and empower employees to be creatively collaborative in a secure environment.

Microsoft 365 Business, on the other hand, is meant for small and mid-sized business that can manage 300 business users and integrates well with Office 365 Business Premium. It offers customized security and management features of Windows 10, Enterprise Mobility and enhanced Security.

• Can connect employees, customers and vendors.
• Gives freedom to employees to connect from anywhere and from any device
• Better security with always-on security
• Single IT console enabled set-up and management of employee devices and services
• Availability of Microsoft Connections, it is a simple-to-use email marketing service
• Availability of Microsoft Listings, which is an easy way to publish your business information on leading sites
• Microsoft Invoicing, which is an excellent way to make professional invoices and get paid fast

What does Microsoft 365 offer?

• It unleashes creativity as it encourages people to work naturally with ink, voice and touch (these are all tools that are use AI and machine learning)
• Offers the widest and deepest range of apps and services with a toolkit for teamwork that is universal. It gives flexibility and choice in how they connect, share and collaborate
• Makes IT easy with unification of users, devices, apps and services management
• Offers built-in intelligent security for better protection of customer data, company data and intellectual property

Pricing

Microsoft 365 Business was made available for public preview from August 2, 2017. It is priced at US $ 20 per user, per month.

If you wish to know how Microsoft 365 can work in your Enterprise, speak to our experts for a discussion.