Indeed, after three years, it’s time for a change for the Why Microsoft Blog.

As the cloud grows in popularity, Office 365 has become a showcase for Microsoft’s commitment to improving access to productivity, collaboration, and communication from anywhere.  Our strong readership is proof of the growing interest in compelling views and case studies that show why Microsoft is the best choice for business productivity. At the same time, we know that our audience wants to keep up with the latest news about Office 365, including new features, capabilities, and updates. 

That’s why we’re bringing together the content you want into one, convenient place.

Starting Monday, Why Microsoft blog posts will shift over to the Microsoft Office 365 blog. You’ll still be able to read about how Office 365 stacks up against other solutions on the market. Plus, you’ll have access to more customer stories and the latest Office 365 announcements.

Please note that while the Why Microsoft blog will be moving, you can still look for great content about what differentiates Microsoft from the competition on the Why Microsoft website.

A big thank you to our readers for following the Why Microsoft blog these past years, for your insightful questions and comments, and for your active participation on Twitter. You are the best, and we hope to continue to hear from you.

Please take a moment to bookmark the Microsoft Office 365 blog and/or subscribe to the RSS feed so you can follow the Why Microsoft blog to its new home. We look forward to seeing you there!

And of all the trade-offs, there’s no bigger compromise than the one between time and money.  Either spend the time doing your own marketing, or spend the money paying someone else to do it. Do your own taxes, or hire an accountant. Manage your own IT system, or contract it out.

It’s rare in business that you can save both time and money. But that is exactly what Office 365 offers.

The Double Bonus of Office 365
With Office 365, there’s no need for trade-offs.  Office 365 saves both time and money.

Saving Time
Office 365 saves small businesses time by reducing the work required to manage an IT infrastructure. You can easily add and manage user accounts without the need for IT expertise using a new web-based management portal specifically designed for organizations with less than 10 users. At the same time, there’s no need to install on-premise servers, manage software licenses, or worry about securing your system.

Office 365 is a subscription service that’s in the cloud and is managed by Microsoft. Like a utility such as electricity or water, you pay a predictable, monthly cost based on your actual usage of the service—and you always have the latest software updates.

Among the small businesses that have saved time by adopting Office 365 is Bea’s Insurance Agency, an Ohio-based insurance company with two employees. Says owner Kerri Stewart: “As a small-business owner with a lot to do, I appreciate how Office 365 removes stress and makes technology less complicated and overwhelming.”

Likewise, by moving to Office 365, the 25-employee engineering firm C&I Engineering has been able to save time spent on managing technology and redirect it to the core business.  “It’s huge that Office 365 is hosted in the cloud and Microsoft is taking care of it all for just a few dollars a month per user,” says Jared Walther, the company’s business development manager, “It allows me to do my job instead of getting up to speed on something that is not my job. I don’t have the time, patience, or money to build an Exchange Server or SharePoint Server setup for our office.”

Saving Money
In addition to saving time, Office 365 can save small businesses money by reducing the need for  technology equipment and maintenance. Small businesses no longer need to purchase servers and software, reducing their capital costs. And with a smaller infrastructure to manage, administrative costs are greatly decreased.

For example, Affirma Consulting, which employees 40 consultants in Bellevue, Wash., has reduced both hardware and administrative IT costs by moving to Office 365—and the savings are significant. Says Michael Brown, CEO of Affirma Consulting: “We anticipate a 25 to 30 percent cost savings when we complete our transition to Office 365.”

Similarly, the staffing services company Redwood Global Inc. has greatly reduced maintenance and repair expenses by moving to Office 365. “With Office 365, you don’t need to hire a $100-per-hour IT professional to fix problems, or worry about updating on-premises servers,” says Randy Clemens, the company’s managing director. “I expect we’ll save at least $8,000 a year by slashing these maintenance and repair expenses.”

In addition to reducing IT expenses, Office 365 substantially increases small business productivity and reduces the need for travel, decreasing costs even further. Using SharePoint Online, for example, C&I Engineering has been able to set up a central portal for document storage, reducing the time it takes for employees to find critical information.

And with Lync Online, the small real estate firm findwell has been able to replace in-person meetings with web conferences. Says Kevin Lisota, the company’s CEO: “By using Lync Online, we have a more time-effective way to share complex information such as contracts, market valuations, and home details with our clients. Now we can replace a lengthy email exchange or a long drive with a quick online meeting.”

A Win-Win for Small Businesses 
With Office 365, there are no trade-offs. Unlike many of the time-money choices small businesses face as they debate whether to do it themselves versus contract it out, Office 365 adds up to both saved time + saved money.

As Chaundra Smith, owner of the beauty products company Naturally Me puts it: “Everyone in the company saves five to 10 hours a week now that we’ve got Office 365. I spend that time with my daughter and making more products.”

 

Skype Breaks Records, Traffic Grows by 44 Percent
Skype now accounts for one-third of all global phone traffic.

Yammer Has 7 million Users as SharePoint Integration Continues
The Microsoft acquisition has been good for Yammer's sales, which nearly tripled from last year.

Microsoft: Outlook Making Progress vs. Gmail
Outlook.com now claims more than 60 million users, and Microsoft is hoping more Gmail users will defect.

Goodbye Hotmail, Hello Outlook
Microsoft starts to move its 300 million Hotmail users to Outlook.com and “for most of those people, that should be a good thing.”

Microsoft Plans to Bring Its Lync Enterprise Communications Platform and Skype Closer Together, Announces Lync 2013 Mobile Apps
Microsoft plans to enable Lync users to call Skype users by June. It is also launching a new suite of Lync 2013 mobile apps for Windows Phone 8, iOS and Android.

Microsoft Adds 100,000 Office 365 Users In Texas
The State of Texas chooses Office 365, saying it will “increase efficiency and help our agencies better serve the needs of citizens without compromising on security or privacy.”

Microsoft Azure Overtakes Amazon's Cloud in Performance Test
The Microsoft Azure cloud outperforms Amazon Web Services in a series of rigorous tests.

How does a small business set up their business for consistent growth in the current environment? 

Office 365: Your Secret to Success

It’s been said that to get whatcha want, you’ve gotta use whatcha got. The beauty of Office 365 is that it can help you greatly expand whatcha got. And with a broader set of high-quality productivity tools in your tool chest, you can gain a competitive edge even in a challenging economy.

Starting at just $6 per user per month, small businesses get cloud-based email, the ability to view and edit Word, Excel, PowerPoint and OneNote files, team sites for sharing files, a public website, instant messaging and video conferencing—and it’s all in the cloud so there’s no need to maintain your own IT infrastructure.

Here are 10 ways Office 365 can help small business owners set themselves up for success in 2013:

1. Work with the tools you already know how to use. Office 365 offers many of the same Office features most users are already familiar with. This makes it easy to get new employees up-and-running very quickly.  And unlike Google Apps, which can require a steep learning curve, Office 365 usually involves minimal training. Says Jeremy Mahler, Director of Technical Operations for  Hickory Farms: “By switching to Office 365, we still had a collaboration environment managed for us in the cloud, and it brought us back to a familiar environment that our users were comfortable  with.”

2. Cut costs that cost your business. Expenses like IT overhead and computer equipment can add up—cutting into your bottom line. Office 365 can reduce your monthly expenses because there’s no requirement for advanced IT knowledge, no need to buy hardware, and very little maintenance required. 

3. Improve your flexibility.  With Office 365, you can quickly add or remove new employees from your IT system as businesses conditions fluctuate. And just like a utility like electricity or water, you pay only for the services you actually use that month.

4. Keep your employees working wherever they are. Office 365 provides a simple way to access and collaborate on documents—whether your employees are working in the same room or across town. And unlike Google Apps, which offers limited offline productivity,Office 365 enables you to keep working even when there’s no Internet connection.

5. Achieve a highly professional image. Office 365 can help you maintain the same professional image as a large corporation with a big budget. You can hold online meetings, create a business email address for all of your employees, easily create a great-looking website, and develop high-quality documents and presentations. You don’t have to worry about losing formatting in Google Docs, as Google Apps users do when they open Office documents. And you have a far broader toolset with which to work when creating  presentations.

6. Take customer service to a new level. Office 365 helps small businesses improve customer service by offering customers high-quality information, right when they ask for it. With SharePoint Online, you can set up a central storage place for company documents, giving employees a fast way to find information. And with Lync Online, you can quickly access the right experts, see if they’re available, and start up a conversation.

7. Reduce the need for travel. Lync Online lets you hold high-quality conferences over the Internet, reducing both the time and cost of travel. You can quickly move from a chat session to a video conference. You can share and present content as well as take notes from within the meeting experience. And you can use the whiteboard to brainstorm and jot down discussion points.

8. Work more closely with customers and partners. Using Lync Online, you can also easily interact with customers and partners to obtain their feedback and involve them in decisions. Unlike Google+ Hangouts, Lync Online includes a virtual whiteboard for highly productive collaboration. And unlike Google+ users, who can only communicate with other Google+ users, users of Lync Online can communicate with anyone even if they don’t have Lync installed.

9. Keep your business information safe and private. Office 365 makes it easy to keep your business data private and secure, just as you do with your physical office. With Office 365, you can tap into the same systems used by Microsoft and other enterprises worldwide to protect email, documents, and networks. And unlike Google, Microsoft doesn’t search-mine customer data or engage in other practices that compromise customer privacy.

10. Eliminate the need for IT expertise. Office 365 is easy to manage and maintain without IT expertise. It includes a web-based management portal that makes it easy to manage users, licenses, and domains from a simple, clean interface.  And unlike Google Apps,it also includes a service health dashboard that’s tailored to your organization so you can see the service-health information that pertains to your specific company.

Multiplying Whatcha Got with Office 365
Office 365 extends the productivity tools available to you, helping you to greatly expand whatcha got. And with more to work with, you’ll be able to truly get whatcha want—which for most small businesses means continued success even in a down economy.

Today’s guest blogger is Faisal Zafar, director of operations for LiveRoute, a Dubai-based technology company that delivers IT solutions to companies throughout the Middle East. A Microsoft Gold Certified Partner, LiveRoute was the first cloud solution provider in the Middle East region.

When we first began operating three years ago, momentum for the cloud was slow as we were a little ahead of this trend in the Middle East region. In the last couple years, however, interest in the cloud has surged. Our revenue has increased by about 160 percent since 2010, and we’re anticipating even greater growth during the coming year.

The Middle East is a very dynamic place. A lot of new businesses are springing up, and many companies are buying other organizations, being merged or acquired.  The cloud is the perfect solution for companies that are growing or shrinking because it gives them the flexibility and agility to add or subtract employees to their IT system very quickly without incurring large capital costs.

Office 365: More Professional than Google Apps
To date, we’ve migrated more than 40 clients to Office 365, and we’re completing an additional four to five migration projects every month.

Most of our clients are migrating to the cloud from on-premise infrastructures. And in many cases, they decide upon Office 365 after evaluating Google Apps. When comparing the two cloud-based services side-by-side, most realize that Office 365 offers a more enterprise-ready solution. Unlike Google, Microsoft has been in the enterprise market for 20 years. The features included in Office 365 are far richer than Google Apps, reflecting the company’s enterprise experience. And since most business users have Exchange and SharePoint backgrounds, it’s a lot easier for companies that choose Office 365 to integrate new employees into the organization.

In addition, customers often choose Office 365 because it a far more integrated solution than Google Apps. For example, employees can work from the familiar environment of Outlook to edit calendars and contacts stored on SharePoint sites, and to track progress on projects. And because SharePoint is integrated with Lync, users can see who’s present and initiate an online meeting right from within SharePoint Online. Integrated features like these really help employees to be more productive.

In a handful of cases, we’ve helped dissatisfied Google Apps customers switch to Office 365. For example, we recently helped an events planning company in the United Arab Emirates (UAE) migrate to Office 365 after a negative experience with migration from Exchange to Google Mail. The company had moved its 150 employees to Gmail but users were soon frustrated after they lost email messages. They also found that the Gmail interface was cluttered and difficult to use. The learning curve was steep, and users were frustrated by the level of technical support that Google provided.

We also helped a multi-service company in the UAE switch to Office 365 after it experienced significant problems with Gmail. For example, the company’s  350 employees weren’t able to attach previous email items to other email messages, a standard industry practice for confirming account details with customers and partners.

By switching to Office 365, both companies were quickly able to resolve these challenges. They now have what they feel is an easier-to-manage and easier-to-use cloud-based service.

Improved Support, Reduced Costs
Every customer that we’ve moved from Google has been far happier with the level of technical support that Microsoft provides. With Google, the support UAE customers receive is email-based. By contrast, Microsoft provides phone-based support and a local phone number in Dubai, and that makes a big difference. 

We’ve recently started circling back to our customers to ask about their experience with Office 365, and the feedback has been very, very positive. Many customers tell us they’ve been able to save money by reducing IT management and travel costs. They like the greater predictability they’ve been able to achieve by eliminating capital expenses in favor of more stable monthly operating costs. IT administrators have had their time freed up for more strategic initiatives such as business process management. And employees like having mobile access to email from a single platform with synchronized calendars and contacts.

There are a lot of benefits our customers are reaping from Office 365. It’s pretty phenomenal. We are looking forward for the new service update which will allow our customers to upgrade to 2013 versions of Office products within their existing subscriptions. There are many promising features that will be made available very soon in our region.

Microsoft: Office 365 Sees Growing Adoption in India
Indian firms of all sizes are choosing Office 365 over Google Apps.

Google App Store Policy Raises Privacy Concerns
Google’s privacy practices draw heat after an Australian software developer said the company was providing him with personal information, including email addresses, of everyone who purchased his mobile app.

Microsoft Office 365 Cloud Data Privacy Rules Explained
While Google search-mines customer data for the betterment of its product, Microsoft has worked to assure customers of the cloud data privacy protection and security standards that Office 365 meets.

Microsoft Launches New Scroogled Video for Valentine’s Day, Says Google Will Read Your Love Letters
Don’t want Google snooping on your Valentine? That’s the question Microsoft asks with its latest “Scroogled” video.

Skype Adds E-Gifting to its Mac and Windows Applications
New updates allow Skype users to send each other gifts in the form of Skype credit gift cards.

7 Things About SharePoint 2013 All IT Pros Should Know
SharePoint 2013 provides useful enhancements “including some that have the power to transform the level of understanding you have about your business.”

Surface Pro Sells Out at Microsoft's Online U.S. Site
Microsoft's new Surface Pro sells out online at Microsoft's website in the U.S., hours after becoming available.

Today, cloud integration accounts for about 90 percent of our business at SADA Systems. We were recently ranked No. 28 among the top 100 cloud services providers (CSPs) worldwide for our deployment of cloud technologies. The opportunities that the cloud presents are extensive.

We’re seeing great momentum for the cloud, and the Microsoft cloud, in particular. The year-over-year growth of our Microsoft cloud practice has doubled over the past two years. Event attendance for both webinars and informative luncheons has been150 percent higher  than expected, confirming the great interest in Office 365. By the end of 2012, we had moved more than 5 million email mailboxes to cloud-computing platforms, a large percentage of these to Office 365.

To date, we’ve migrated more than 150 clients to Office 365. Customers often choose Office 365 because of its security and reliability. In addition, many customers are excited about achieving a better-integrated social media presence by incorporating Skype and Yammer.

Office 365 also enables companies to be more flexible. For example, companies can easily onboard new employees as they undergo structural changes such as mergers and acquisitions. They can also easily bring remote offices into the IT fold as their business grows and their workforce becomes more distributed.

Preparing for the Move
While the cloud offers many benefits, it’s important for companies to perform their due diligence before making the move. Although cloud migrations have been marketed to be “as simple as a flip of the switch,” the reality is that cloud implementations require careful planning.

SADA Systems has defined methods to ensure that the IT system a company chooses is in alignment with both its technology and business goals. Among the factors a company should consider before moving to the cloud are planning and assessment, training and change management:

• Planning and assessment: When moving to the cloud, the first step is always to assess your current IT infrastructure and evaluate which technologies will best meet your organization’s needs. Companies should determine which individual services of Office 365 make the most sense for their organization, and establish a timeline for what workloads they will move to the cloud, when. They should also determine how they will evaluate their move to Office 365.

• Training: While many companies that migrate to Office 365 are already familiar with Exchange and Office products, training can be useful to help administrators best leverage the full range of tools available to them. In addition, it can be helpful to train IT staff to understand how new systems, such as anti-spam and anti-virus management features, differ from on-premise versions to ensure users are maximizing the feature set available to them in Office 365. With the new side-by-side installation capabilities of Office 2013, training users on feature updates and differences between versions is effortless.

• Change management: Crisp, clear, and effective communication is essential to any successful migration. Employees sometimes don’t read email—particularly email sent by the IT department. Developing a countdown-oriented communication plan that targets the right audience, using the right media, at the right time, is critical.

Growing Momentum for the Microsoft Cloud
To date, SADA Systems has helped several different types of organizations move to Office 365, including retailers, service providers, and academic institutions. We’ve also seen a lot of interest in Office 365 among financial institutions. This is particularly exciting because it demonstrates how far Office 365 has come in meeting organizations’ most stringent security and compliance requirements.

We recently helped a major national fitness retail chain with more than 10,000 employees move to Office 365. After evaluating multiple cloud solutions, the company decided that Office 365 best met its security needs. We also helped a 2,000 employee IP networking validation company move to Office 365 after a power generator exploded in its datacenter, leaving the company without IT access for almost 48 hours. The company has made a complete move to the cloud, and we continue to help it add new employees to Office 365 each time it acquires a new business.

While we’re already seeing strong interest in Microsoft’s cloud-based service, we expect that interest to intensify even more with the release of Office 2013. By offering both a “cloud first” feature set and an on-premise suite of software, Office 2013 is sure to fill an important gap in the marketplace. Our prediction is that it will spur a whole new class of organizations to embrace the benefits of cloud computing.

Q: Please tell us about Rakuten. Jonathan Levine: With main offices in Tokyo, Japan, we rank among the world’s top 10 Internet services companies, with more than 9,000 employees in several countries. We provide a variety of one-stop Internet services, including e-commerce, travel, media, finance, and online books.

Q: Why did you investigate a cloud services solution to manage your messaging and collaboration?
Levine: As our business grew, personnel recruitment in Japan and overseas increased. This great increase in personnel, however, directly affected the mail system. For corporate activities, email is essential. But maintaining the necessary infrastructure of an on-premises system required a huge cost. Even members of the Group Information Systems Department had to allocate an incredibly large amount of time to the operation and management of the mail system. We wanted to move to a cloud technology to unify communications across the enterprise and make it easier for employees to connect.

Q: Why did you choose Office 365 over Google Apps?
Levine: We carefully compared Microsoft Office 365 and Google Apps. In the end, we chose Exchange Online in Office 365 for its strong security, great usability, and global capability, which includes China. Exchange Online was the only service that we could use to build a secure messaging environment accessible from anywhere.

Q: What benefits are you experiencing by using Exchange Online and Office 365?
Levine: By implementing Office 365, we have been able to drastically reduce the amount of resources spent on maintenance and support of the mail system, which has helped to reduce costs. We have freed the staff from day-to-day management so that the team and I can now concentrate on our core operations without being sidetracked by mail issues. Office 365 is a service that can be used globally. The interface supports various languages, and the service provides a global support system. Also, Microsoft has a very strong presence as an IT partner that we can rely on as we strengthen our global strategy.

Read the full story online. For more success stories about people like Jonathan Levine, read other real-world testimonials on the whymicrosoft website.

7 Reasons Why You Should Buy Microsoft’s New Version of Office
Seven reasons why people will want to buy the new Office 365 Home Premium Edition subscription plan.

Toyota North America CIO Discusses Auto Giant’s Deployment of Office 365
 “Microsoft’s offering was the most mature and had the capabilities we needed,” Zack Hicks, CIO of Toyota North America, says in a Q&A with Microsoft.

Microsoft: Outlook Users Need “Protection” from Gmail Ads
A Microsoft survey reveals that people resent having their emails scanned to display ads.

Microsoft Office 2013 Gains Free Bing Apps
Microsoft announces the availability of five new Bing apps for its Office 2013 and Office 365 products.

How to Drive Sustainable SharePoint Adoption in Your Organization
Organizations that provide effective training will maximize their company’s investment in SharePoint.

Microsoft Begins $75 Million Plan to Spur African Entrepreneurs
Microsoft launches 4Africa Initiative to bring as many as a million small African businesses online over the next three years.

Thanks to advancing technology, the mobile office is becoming a reality for an increasing number of small businesses across the planet.  According to one study, 71 percent of small businesses have become more mobile in the past year.

The trick is having technology that’s easy to use yet sophisticated enough to make your mobile office just as productive as your brick-and-mortar office.

Creating a Highly Productive Mobile Workforce
Microsoft Office 365 creates a more productive mobile workforce by providing employees access to email, documents, contacts, and calendars–using a variety of devices from virtually any location.

Workers can use Lync Online to see who’s available, send instant messages, hold online video conferences and collaborate on projects with other employees whether they’re in the office, on the road, or in their homes.  They can also use SharePoint Online to store the latest version of client documents, project schedules, resource files, and contracts, so everyone has access to the information they need wherever they are.

And unlike Google Apps, which offers limited offline productivity, workers can be just as productive when they don’t have an Internet connection. With Office Client on the desktop, Office 365 users can keep working on documents, spreadsheets and presentations—anytime, anywhere.

Unifying a Dispersed Workforce with Office 365
Among the small businesses that use Office 365 to unify a dispersed workforce is Be Learning, a creative learning consultancy based in Australia. With 75 percent of its employees working from the road as sales people and, the company needed a way to increase the productivity of its mobile workforce.

The company evaluated Google Docs but decided against it because its employees weren’t familiar with Gmail. By choosing Office 365, the company has been able to provide employees with the ability to check email and calendars from their mobile phones, and use Lync Online to help get answers to questions, determine a colleague’s availability, and conduct online meetings – all important tasks for the company’s staff.

“Office 365 is very user friendly, and it’s great for the majority of people on the team who are not very technically minded,” says Alisha Waterman, Strategic Projects Manager for Be Learning.

Working as if They’re in the Same Room
Likewise, the real estate brokerage findwell uses Office 365 to increase employee productivity and improve customer service. The firm utilizes SharePoint Online to manage documents such as home-listing checklists, flyer templates, and its employee manual. And it uses Lync Online web conferencing to share complex information such as contracts, market valuations, and home details with its customers.

“Clients expect us to be reachable and have the answers that they need at all times,” says Kevin Lisota, chief executive officer of findwell. “Office 365 supports that effort, whether our agents are in the office, at a home, or in a coffee shop “Thanks to Office 365, our agents can access the information that they need with the tools that they are already familiar with. That is a great advantage.”

Seattle-based textbook publisher David M. Kroenke also adopted Office 365 to unify a small staff of editors and designers located all over the United States. With SharePoint Online, for example, his company can easily keep track of documents and project calendars. And using the audio and video conferencing capabilities of Lync Online, employees seamlessly collaborate with other team members from all over the country.

“Talking on the telephone is okay for editing written words, but what if you want to talk about a diagram or a picture or something visual?,” says Kroenke.  “Using Lync in Office 365, with one click, I can be in a video conference with my co-worker, we can bring up documents that we’re working on and talk about them, we can bring up the outline or a whiteboard, just as if we’re sitting in the same room. And we’re not.”

Taking Your Office with You Wherever You Go
By 2015, well over a third of the world’s workforce will be mobile, according to the market intelligence firm International Data Corporation (IDC).  While this trend offers great opportunities for small businesses, it also requires the right technology.

Office 365 provides just that. By using Office 365, small businesses can achieve a high level of productivity no matter how dispersed their workforce. In short, they now have the ability to take their office wherever they go.
 
To learn more about the benefits of Office 365 for small businesses, please see your white paper, “Top 10 Reasons for SMBs to Choose Office 365.”