This month Microsoft decided to make some changes to way Office 365 on-boarding works for smaller businesses with the new Office 365 fast track. While fast track has existed for some time, it is now open to companies with 50 to 149 seats rather than just those with 150 or more.

The fast track to Office 365 provides a quick and easily deployable system into small to medium sized business with these core functions:

• Continuous, any-time assistance from a remote Microsoft support staff that is specialized in deploying Office 365 into new environments. Important on-boarding help is given by these specialists to both customers and partners.

• Large inventory of installation tools built to make sure the on-boarding and deployment of Office 365 goes properly by checking the domain configuration and user identities.

• Support for this fast track is open to many different countries as the languages vary from English Chinese, French, German, Italian, Japanese, Brazilian, Portuguese, and Spanish.

The ultimate goal for this change is to give the highest level of value to their potential customers. As an abundance of companies are still using free apps like Google Docs, companies in the size range of 50 to 149 employees have an extremely difficult time making these free productivity apps work smoothly.

Now, the new Office 365 fast track will enable companies to use a cloud based app that scales with them instead of settling for free, static software. Not only is the lack of scalability in these free apps an issue, but the security and centralization of solutions also becomes a problem.

After a company grows to include roughly 100 employees, they need to begin thinking about the long-term and increasing productivity, security, and scalability are the requirements to exist in the long-term.

Microsoft currently sees about 50,000 small to medium sized business become Office 365 customers every single month, which will likely increase with this change.

Microsoft stated –

“We want to make it easier for small to midsized businesses (SMBs) to move to Office 365 and experience the ability for your employees to access team files from anywhere, collaborate in real-time from any device and get enterprise-grade security that works as hard for you as for the largest organizations.”

Interested in Fast Tracking? You can learn more about what it is and how to do it here.

Image credit: https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/7/74/Office_365_logo.png