Want to save 37% off your Office 365 deployments and your annual subscription costs? Read up below to see how we did just this for our tiny Office 365 E3 deployment here at MetrixData360.
Many of you may not know this, but we use Office 365 to run our business. It wasn’t our first choice (in fact we used to run on Google), but we ended up migrating to it for one very simple reason:
- Outlook Calendars and Google just don’t work well. We would accept meetings on our iPhones and with the one-way sync between Google and calendaring (if you accept in Google it will populate to your phone but not the other way around) we were missing important meetings.
When we decided to move to Office 365 we purchased E3 subscriptions for our 12 users. It was just the simplest thing for us to do. As we were doing budgeting for 2016, we were looking at the costs of all of our subscriptions (Office 365, DropBox, WebEx, etc.) and realized the annual fees on all of these were getting out of hand so we decided to follow our own advice and optimized our licensing.
For various reasons we will continue to use Dropbox and WebEx (even though we have the ability to use OneDrive and Skype for Business). Simplicity and functionality rules for us here at MetrixData360.
OneDrive does not work well with Mac (and a few of us use those). The only way to get access is via the web client which is a very cumbersome way to access file storage technologies. Even though they have a OneDrive for business client for Mac (Beta), after many hours of trying we never were able to get it to work correctly. Microsoft really has a lot of work to do on this one.
Similarly, Skype for Business is not as good as WebEx for meetings. We use the Instant Message features of Skype but not the online meetings (we were finding it was hard to manage, calls dropping, poor call quality when doing VOIP, etc). One of our biggest reasons for continuing on WebEx however was for marketing. WebEx is so much more feature rich for recording and doing webinars, which are very important to our business.
When we looked at our usage we found that half of our users really only needed Exchange Online Plan 1. We swapped them out immediately and dropped our number of E3 subscriptions. The net was a 37% reduction in our annual costs of Office 365. I hesitate to think of the impact to the bottom line of our largest clients (100’’s of thousands if not millions of dollars are being wasted) that are overpaying Microsoft.
We have some exciting news that we will be sharing shortly. We are working with our partners over at Block 64 on a new service offering that we will be launching in the first quarter of 2016 to help companies who use Office 365 get the same results we did. We plan on automating the review and showing you how to optimize those Office 365 subscriptions across your organization to save your precious budget dollars! Stay tuned!
MetrixData360 specializes in helping organizations who are facing a Microsoft audit with assistance through every stage of the audit process. Our goal is to reduce any compliance gaps you may have and ensure that you are only paying for the software and services you really need. Contact us today to book a free consultation to see if we can help you!
