Information & Communications Technology (ICT) can be a key for organisations to run faster, more efficient and productively. Most companies look to invest in ICT to enable their employees to speed up working processes, be more effective and agile. With higher productivity and better customer satisfaction, organisations can expect higher company profitability.
As cloud technology is maturing, it is able to address many business needs in today’s business landscape. Many organisations are eager to adopt various cloud-based solutions for better efficiency and agility.
Microsoft Office suite is a productivity software that has existed for decades. Pioneering and embracing the concept of cloud computing, Microsoft offers the Office suite as Office 365, a cloud service, bundled with additional productivity services, such as Exchange mail, Skype for Business and SharePoint collaboration tools. With this new flexible licensing scheme, it will be easier for organisations to scale up (or scale down) their investment to fit their business needs, and simultaneously future-proofing it. This flexibility also enables organisation with any scales to adopt the full spectrum of this productivity solution from Microsoft: from Small-Medium Enterprises (SMEs) to global operation enterprises.
Telkomtelstra, as a leading end-to-end managed solutions service provider, and also as a Cloud Service Provider (CSP) of Microsoft in Indonesia, is now offering a cloud-based Microsoft Office 365 solution that is integrated with the Managed WAN Optimisation Service. The utilization of Office 365 will allow organizations to improve their business collaboration, efficiency and productivity. This will allow organisations to have more efficient cost management, support and network performance when rolling out the Office 365 cloud platform.
Agus F Abdillah, Chief Product Synergy Officer (CPSO) at telkomtelstra, stated that the key reason that pushes companies to migrate to cloud-based Office 365 in near future is because Microsoft Office is a leader of business productivity software for years. In offline mode it only works on single device, which offers less flexibility and productivity. Hence, by using Office 365, companies still enjoy the benefits of Microsoft Office, but with capability that could allow them to synchronise all current, up to date information across all of the available devices. This will drive greater employees’ productivity, especially by creating effective business workflows and creative working approach, which in turn will build long-lasting relationship with customer through extraordinary customer experience.
There are, however, challenges associated with moving to and management of Office 365, and the telkomtelstra Office 365 product contains additional value to address these common challenges that our customers will face.
1. Professional Services
Office 365 rollout deployment strategies will differ between organisations, and can vary in time and complexity, based on a variety of factors. Some elements that can influence can be
- Organisation structure
- Existing complexity
- Amount of data and/or users
- Agility
- Co-existence requirements
Professional services are available from telkomtelstra to assist customers to migrate to Office 365. This can involve high level strategic workshops, creation of detailed design documentation, migration planning and the migration itself.
2. Managed Service for Office 365
Customers moving to Office 365 may not have the in-house skills to manage advanced aspects of their Office 365 deployment after they have been migrated to the cloud platform, including both the cloud platform itself, as well as infrastructure that may be required on customer premises to support identity integration and Single Sign On. Additionally, cloud platform availability, alerting and usage information can provide critical insight into the way a business consumes cloud.
The telkomtelstra Office 365 product offering allows customers to leverage an experienced Office 365 support capability, rather than resourcing this capability internally.
3. Optimisation for Office 365
Customers moving to cloud platforms inevitably experience increased traffic across their Internet links. Additionally, telkomtelstra’s existing MNS Wan Optimisation capability addresses this concern by bundling WAN Optimisation with the Office 365 product.
WAN Optimisation can provide real time visibility of the apps performance across the network, reduce application ‘chattiness’ and overcome the effect of network latency while reducing bandwidth requirements. WAN Optimisation for Cloud applications have had a dramatic impact on Office 365 and other SaaS applications.
4. Office 365 Licenses
Customers who have not yet purchased Office 365 can do so through our Office 365 Licensing offer, with flexible licensing plans available. This service can be consolidated with existing services from Telkom or telkomtelstra. Research conducted by Microsoft involving more than 1,000 Office 365 users in various organizations showed a numbers of advantages by adopting Office 3651:
- Lower total costs of ownership (TCO). The total cost of ownership for Office 365 is significantly lower compared to a comparable on-premises solution. Contributing elements were the elimination of capital expenditures on hardware and software, less effort to deploy and maintain the solutions, taking advantage of included capabilities that eliminated other third-party solution costs, and the ability to very efficiently deploy the latest features going forward.
- Higher productivity. Higher levels of productivity for all Office 365 users. This was especially pronounced for highly mobile workers and those who are very dependent on data to make important decisions. Higher productivity has reduced sales cycle time as well as increased business agility.
- Greater focus on strategic priorities. For the IT organization, considerably less time is spent on blocking and tackling activities such as deploying and patching servers. This frees up their time to work on projects that deliver true business value. This, in turn, means that business users have the solutions and support they need to focus on business priorities.
- Improved uptime. Availability for the Microsoft solutions “has gone from 98% to practically 100%.” Microsoft’s service-level agreements (SLAs) are better than the previous internal ones. This is very important since email is one of the most mission-critical applications
An example of an organization who has adopted Office 365 is a retail company with a dozen branches across Indonesia. The head office is in Jakarta, employing more than 100 people who are mostly mobile when they are working. The company is currently in the developmental period where it is critical that organisation is highly accessible, collaborative, and has information and data that are managed properly. The company tried to combine multiple vendors to support their operation. Different products from different vendors are combined to provide multi-solution for software, data storage, email server and communications. However, it proved to be time-consuming and costly with many vendors to manage and a much higher TCO. Since they adopted Office 365 as their all-round productivity solution, their employees are now able to work faster and share information in a much more efficient manner. The spending can then be optimised by converting CAPEX to OPEX. Office 365 has been proved as a very effective and efficient business solution.
Based on Agus and his team’s own experience, Office 365 enables employees to access their office works, files, documents and emails anywhere, anytime, using their own devices. The work flow will run smoother and employees can significantly speed up the work process. He added that SharePoint in Office 365 can be used as a digital library that can be accessed by anyone with an account of the same group (i.e: Company). With SharePoint, we can build an internal company website consisting a document library of policies, marketing guideline and sales tool-kit. Having a centralized, transparent and accessible data centre like SharePoint, clearly we can build a more efficient working process.
Office 365’s SharePoint enables multiple employees to collaborate on developing a single document together in real time. Cloud technology requires those users to be connected to internet during the collaboration, hence the internet traffic is rising. This high WAN traffic could lead to network congestion which ironically will disrupt the productivity of collaborative work. In some worst cases, network congestion leads to corrupted files and data loss. To anticipate this, instead of upgrading your bandwidth, WAN optimisation could be your wise solution.
(June, 2017)
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1 Breslin, A.& Lipsitz, J.W. “The Total Economic Impact of Microsoft Office 365” A Forrester Total Economy Impact Study Commissioned by Microsoft.