Nobody likes higher prices, but in the past year none of us could avoid paying more for almost everything. CNN noted that the prices we paid for our household items, transportation, and groceries all went up in 2021. The Wall Street Journal noted that “[f]ood prices are estimated to rise 5% in the first half of 2022, according to research firm IRI,” so higher prices seem an inevitability for 2022 as well.
Microsoft announced last year that the prices for their Microsoft 365 Business and Enterprise subscription plans would slightly increase starting in 2022. At the time, Microsoft noted this was “the first substantive pricing update since we launched Office 365 a decade ago” and that their new “pricing reflects the increased value we have delivered to our customers over the past 10 years.” The following table compares the old pricing for Microsoft 365 Business and Office 365 Enterprise plans with the updated pricing that takes effect on March 1, 2022:
Amaxra consultants understand that no business wants to pay more. We are early adopters of Microsoft 365, with a decade of expertise at using this cloud-powered productivity solution at our own company as well as implementing Microsoft 365 for our expansive base of small-to-midsized business (SMB) customers. Amaxra believes we can show why these slight increases in price for Microsoft 365 Business deliver measurable value for your organization.
Collaboration for hybrid workforces with Microsoft Teams
Real-time collaboration is a must-have for any business today. Due to the COVID-19 pandemic, the need for employees “living in lockdown” to safely collaborate with peers and partners in real-time was a challenge for many corporate IT departments. For organizations with Microsoft 365, real-time collaboration was quickly and easily enabled with Microsoft Teams. Amaxra can point to our own real-world example of how Microsoft Teams enabled the transition to efficient and collaborative remote working. At the height of the pandemic in 2020, Amaxra used Microsoft Teams to safely conduct all business so efficiently that we eliminated our formal office space.
However, many workplaces are transitioning to hybrid working environments. Hybrid workforces can choose to either work in a centralized office environment or work remotely via any device they’re comfortable with using. Microsoft Teams enables hybrid workforces because it is cloud-powered collaboration app available on any internet-connected device. Just in the past year, Microsoft added 300 new features to Teams for enabling safe and productive collaboration in hybrid working environments—and those new features were incredibly valuable.
The immense value of Microsoft Teams for IT supporting hybrid workforces
Imagine a formal team meeting with your peers in Microsoft Teams scheduled by your manager working remotely from her home office in Denver to include employees working from a coffee shop in Seattle and in the huddle room at the headquarters in Orlando. Microsoft added unlimited dial-in audio conferencing for Teams so the employees can phone into the meeting using a toll-free number when WiFi connectivity is spotty. During the video meeting, the number of onscreen faces shown in “gallery mode” was increased to 49 total meeting participants and those participants can virtually raise their hand and react to speakers using emojis. Anyone in the meeting can share screens and collaborate with a virtual whiteboard. Meeting leaders can assign specific attendees with lists of follow-up tasks that are tracked in Teams or using integrations from popular third-party project management software. Closed-captioning for differently-abled employees are generated in real-time with speaker attribution and full transcripts of the meeting (along with are automatically stored securely in the cloud for later review.
Recall that at the height of the pandemic, many businesses scrambled to find ways to enable real-time collaboration for all employees, often paying for multiple different software and services from competing providers. Yet those companies using Microsoft 365 were given a panoply of Microsoft Teams collaboration features that made every meeting incredibly efficient anywhere your employees work—without having to buy and integrate anything new into your existing IT stack. Every business owner knows that’s worth an extra dollar or two per month.
Added cyber-security for all Microsoft 365 users
Ask any IT leader what keeps them up at night, and you’ll most often get an answer related to cyber-security at the business. Ransomware attacks took over the headlines, and in just the first three months of 2021 the UK’s Cyber-security Centre recorded three times the number of attacks they saw in the entire year of 2019. The open source Java Log4j exploit first posted in December 2021 was called “one of the most serious I’ve seen in my entire career, if not the most serious” by top U.S. cybersecurity defense official, Jen Easterly. Amaxra’s CIO is closely watching these, and other cyber-security exploits related to deepfakes, industrial IoT, and the cloud for 2022.
As the threat landscape evolved, Microsoft added new cyber-security capabilities to Microsoft 365 Business and Enterprise plans such as data loss prevention (DLP) for email and documents, sensitivity labels, and message encryption to help keep your company’s important data safe. To best support remote and hybrid workforces, Microsoft also added rich mobile device management (MDM) and other cloud-based cyber-security tools such as the Endpoint Manager to Microsoft 365. These cyber-security features are embedded into Microsoft 365 Business and Enterprise plans, which would cost significantly more than the $2-$4 extra dollars per month if purchased from a separate vendor then integrated into your company’s IT stack.
Trust the Microsoft 365 licensing experts at Amaxra
We stressed the importance of choosing a Microsoft Gold-level partner such as Amaxra. Not only will your company enjoy a consultative experience where our experts provide you with advice on how to maximize every dollar spent on Microsoft 365, but you also get enhanced service delivery and support.