Changes to the Office 365 P and M plans

Microsoft has release a blog post:

http://blogs.office.com/2014/07/09/evolving-office-365-plans-for-small-and-midsized-businesses/

That details some significant changes to the P and M plans. Basically they are being replaced by 3 simpler plans:

Office 365 Business – The full Office applications – Outlook, Word, Excel, PowerPoint, OneNote and Publisher, with 1TB of OneDrive for Business cloud storage to access, edit and share your documents across your Windows PC, Mac, iPad, Windows tablet and smartphone.
Office 365 Business Essentials – The core cloud services for running your business – business class email and calendaring, Office Online, online meetings, IM, video conferencing, cloud storage and file sharing and much more.
Office 365 Business Premium – Get everything from both the Office 365 Business and Business Essentials plans.

You can read the details in the post but here are my initial thoughts on what I have read:

– It is going to greatly simplify the options for businesses. Effectively now one plan with desktop Office, another with cloud services and the third with a combination of both.

– Effectively no more seat limitations. Experience indicates that customers initially select the cheapest current plan and get stuck with a 25 user hard limit as they grow. No more. These plans scale to 300 users.

– A smoother way to upgrade plans. It seems that moving from any of these three new plans to existing Enterprise plans will not be the rip and replace we see now if you need to upgrade from P to M or E.

– The ability to add other plans like Project, Visio,, etc that you used to be only able to add to Enterprise plans.

– Yammer will be available with any plan that includes cloud services (i.e. not the entry Business plan). This highlights Microsoft’s continuing focus on Yammer as an important tool for its cloud services. So, if you are not into Yammer yet you should be.

– AD federation with all plans. This to me indicates that Microsoft is focusing more on identity management and on premise integration. This is good because it is a point of differentiation for their service.

– The new plans are going to be cheaper than the existing plans. This will always be the trend with cloud services but it is good to see that you are effectively getting more features for less money.

– OneDrive for Business is become are much more important part of Microsoft’s plan going forward. It is really the way to bring SMB’s easily to the cloud. The plain Business offering gives them OneDrive with 1TB and Office on their desktop and devices. From there it is an easy step up to add more cloud services. Less friction, lower barrier to entry means an easier transition. However, what it does mean for many is that they need to learn more about what OneDrive can offer and how to manage and maintain the product.

– The only down side I see is that during the transition there will be some confusion around how the migration will happen, how to get the new features, when the new features will become available, etc. That is part of technology and has been the case before with Office 365. However, the end result is that it will be dimplier which is a great result. For people selling and supporting Office 365 it means a little more work to understand all this.

So in conclusion after digesting all this and reflecting on it a bit I believe this is a very positive move for the product and bring it more into line with what people have been asking for (and who says Microsoft doesn’t listen?). I also think that it unlocks a huge amount of more features and abilities for SMBs who are currently on P and M plans that they eventually find limiting.

It is still early days for all this change but in short I like what I see and acknowledge the fact that Microsoft is will to make these major changes to the product offerings and that it is announcing these early in the piece. I’m sure I’ll have more to say as time goes along and we get more details but it is all very positive.

Bye bye tower

For over 8 years I’ve used the above tower machine in a range of roles. I bought it for around $800 initially and used it to run my Hyper-V servers, both production and testing. I eliminated the production requirements of the Hyper V machine by moving them to the cloud (e.g, this blog used to run on a SharePoint site I had running on that machine). The test machines I migrated on Virtual Box running on a big HP Envy 17” laptop so they would be at least portable.

Once its life as a Hyper V host was over I reprovisioned the box to run Windows desktop operating system for a while.

Recently, I was considering getting a replacement for this machine to run everything plus some more virtual testing machines. However, as I outlined in this blog post:

I finally get Azure

When I stopped and thought about what I actually wanted to do I realized I could do everything I needed to in the cloud using something like Azure for the high end grunt for my virtual testing environment.

That meant I no longer needed to spend the $2,500 or so buying a new desktop, Azure would be far more cost effective since I simply turn off the the Azure virtual machines when I don’t need them so it costs me next to nothing.

After that epiphany, and without the need to replace this tower, my thoughts turned to whether I actually needed that machine at all. To make sure, I switched it off and started to use my Surface Pro as my main machine.

After two weeks, and having not turned the old tower box on, I knew I no longer required its services. It has now been wiped and is appearing on eBay looking for a new owner.

This $800 piece of hardware as served me well over the years. In that time it only blew its power supply twice for a grand total of about $150 for parts to repair. When I bought the box initially I toyed with the idea of buying a name brand server and building my ‘date centre’ on that but then I decided to take the opposite path and get the cheapest thing possible and see how long it lasted.

Well 8 years later it is running without an issue and would make anyone a fine workstation. But you know what? This machine has once again confirmed to me why the cloud is fast becoming the solution for more and more IT ‘stuff’. So much so that I no longer need this tower machine, I can use my Surface, Azure and Office 365.

Since I have simplified my own IT and moved more stuff to the cloud I have have cut my power bill by more than 50%. I expect that to fall even further without this tower machine being on most of the day. I have more space under my desk, my office is less noisy and I don’t keep kicking it accidentally either!

This however is not the end of my minimization quest. Next on the list is my long serving HP Envy 17”, which currently needs an external fan blowing on it to keep it cool enough to rest your hand on. With all my testing machine now in Azure and accessible on any device just about I no longer have need for it either. So when I can get a Surface 3 Pro that HP machine will also be looking for a new home.

When I take look back to the time when I had over 6 independent servers running on unique hardware doing different things, a desktop, a laptop, etc to what minimal equipment I have now but with more power, functionality and flexibility thanks to the cloud, I can only imagine what the future holds.

However, like I said, my process is not complete yet. The HP Envy 17” is now on borrowed time and I look forward to further falls in my next electricity bill.

SharePoint Online migration–Pilers and Filers

A while back I wrote the first in a series of articles about migration to SharePoint Online. If you haven’t already, I suggest you go back and read the article:
The classic SharePoint migration mistake
What I want to cover in this article are the two styles of existing file storage systems you’ll find already in place at businesses – ‘piling’ and ‘filing’ – both of which have different challenges when it comes to migration to SharePoint Online.

Let’s start with the more common ‘system’ of file storage in a business – ‘piling’. In essence a business that ‘piles’ simply uses existing network shares or local hard disks as nothing more than dumping ground for files. There is no structure, no naming convention and stuff is basically all over the place without any rhyme or reason.
When you see this style of storage ‘implementation’ you should appreciate that the business has not put any time into developing standards for itself. It has all generally been about hast and once the document has been completed it is generally lost forever amongst all the other flotsam and jetsam on the network share.
Therefore, the most appealing aspect to a ‘piler’ is the ability to locate documents and content using search. This is what SharePoint Online is great at. This therefore should be the major aspect in which you use to sell SharePoint to a ‘piler’. Where you are going to struggle is trying to put structure around the existing files.
My initial post on SharePoint migration pointed out what a BAD IDEA simply dumping the files into a single document library is. In the case of ‘pilers’ this means you are going to have to put some structure in place to get their files under control. My advice is to start but dividing things into a couple of big chunks. Maybe one document library for each customer or perhaps some by function or project. Whatever it is don’t get too ambitious with the structure, just break it up enough so it fits comfortably into a couple of document libraries or sub sites. It is important that the structure you create is clear to the customer. That means keeping the naming convention simple and short.
Once you have done that make sure that the customer understands that their data is still there but they can either look in one of the ‘chunked’ document libraries or sites you used or they can use the search function. For ‘pilers’ you REALLY need to emphasize and demonstrate the search abilities of SharePoint Online and ensure that all staff know how to use it to find what they want.
Most importantly, you can’t just leave a ‘piler’ here because what are they going to do? That’s right, they are again simply going to ‘pile’ information into places inside SharePoint Online that you never imagined. The long game here is that you want to start moving ‘pilers’ towards being ‘filers’. You don’t however want to convert them totally, you simply balance out their tendencies.

‘Filers’ are at the complete opposite end of the spectrum. What ‘filers’ love to do is create endless directory structures full of nothing but sub-directories and put files at the bottom of these, layers and layers down.
‘Filers’ too also have a significant need to search for information but they have the advantage that they have already started categorizing the information. You can therefore use this structure and mimic it using document libraries, sub-sites and meta data. It will again mean you have to step back and look at what structure works best but the flatter the better.
So can you see what the desired outcome is for ‘filers’? Yes, that’s right, you want to move them towards being more of a ‘piler’ and letting SharePoint Online search, filtering and sorting do all the hard work they used to implement with complex and static directory structures. The important thing when working with ‘filers’ is to show them how although much of their information is now contained in a single document library, they can use filtering, sorting and views to quickly navigate to the information they want. The good thing is that unlike ‘pilers’ they have already created the structure outline for you. All you need to do is map that into appropriate locations within SharePoint Online.
If you leave ‘filers’ to their own devices with SharePoint Online, what they’ll do is start creating more and more sub directories in document libraries. You really want to discourage this as it hides information and that structure usually only makes sense to a very small subset of people in a business. To prevent this happening with ‘filers’ you need to continue to demonstrate how SharePoint Online filtering, sorting and the use of multiple libraries provides a much better and more flexible filing system than what they used to have.
Again, you don’t want to covert ‘filers’ fully into ‘pilers’, you simply want to balance out their tendencies to move too far to one side of the ‘storage’ spectrum.
Thus, in summary, the first determination you need to make when you are speaking to a customer about migrating to SharePoint Online is how much of a ‘piler’ or ‘filer’ they are. Where are they situated in the spectrum? All customers will fall somewhere between the two extremes, however the approach you should be taking is independent of this fact. The approach you should be taking is that you should be aiming to get them to 50% ‘piling’ and 50% ‘filing’ within SharePoint Online. That’s the sweet spot where the product can really work its full magic.
Most importantly, is that any initial migration is just the start of the process and the opportunity if you are a reseller. To achieve the most optimal results continued work is going to be required in order to achieve ‘storage nirvana’ through all the features of SharePoint Online. Migration is therefore not a one shot deal, it is a process that continues to develop and evolve over time as you move a customer from the ‘simple’ storage to full collaboration with SharePoint Online.
Hopefully this second post in my series about migrating to SharePoint Online has given you a simple method to evaluate your customers and secondly given you a direction in which to move with them (i.e. a 50/50 balance for everyone) when considering your migration strategy. I’ll be diving into more specifics in future posts so stay tuned.