What is Microsoft 365 Business?

Microsoft 365 Business is a new solution designed for small and midsize businesses (SMB),
bringing together the best-in-class productivity and collaboration capabilities of Office
365 with device management and security solutions to safeguard business data. 

Microsoft 365 Business enables your customers to:
▪ Create their best with tools like Word, Excel, PowerPoint, Outlook, OneNote and Access.
▪ Be productive from anywhere, with business-class email from Outlook and access to cloud files with OneDrive for Business.
▪ Conduct online meetings and get instant messaging with Skype for Business.
▪ Collaborate in real time with the chat-based workspace Microsoft Teams.
▪ Safeguard their business by enforcing malware protection for Windows devices, with Windows Defender.
▪ Help protect your data and intellectual property with App Protection for Office mobile apps
on iOS and Android devices, and Mobile Device Management for Windows 10 PCs
▪ Save time and be protected with consistent configuration across newly deployed PCs running Windows 10 Business and auto deployment of Office 365 apps, provided by Windows Autopilot.
▪ Be secured and always up to date with Office 365 updates and Windows 10.
▪ Simply manage technology costs in one subscription, with simple per user, per month pricing.

Marketing Automation

The old ways of marketing's time-consuming manual processes and limited view of customer data are gone. The tedium of repetitive tasks can exhaust marketing teams, and the lack of visibility results in ineffective campaigns.

Without an efficient and accurate way to collect and analyse customer data, marketers are limited in their ability to spot trends, build targeted programs and deliver positive business outcomes.

This is where marketing automation software steps in. An integral part of successful marketing strategies, automation software helps streamline, measure and, of course, automate your team's current tasks, data and workflows to successfully complete a campaign.

Marketing automation software can simplify a marketer's manual processes, including:

•   Segmenting customers: Rank customers by their lead potential. Grouping leads by demographics, professional details or behavour always keeps relevance top of mind.

•    Scheduling emails: Send personalized emails to groups of segmented audiences and triggered email responses after prospects fill in forms or download content.

•     Lead nurturing: Track your prospect's behaviour on social media, on your website or in response to your email campaigns throughout the funnel.

•   Social media postings: Automate parts of your campaign with tasks and alerts to ensure that you take advantage of every opportunity to reach your customers. You can even use this technology to schedule social media postings and communications across all platforms, saving you time and amplifying your reach to followers, fans and customers.  

"When your team can depend on a single platform to handle time-consuming tasks, productivity skyrockets, costs decrease, and you can easily track results to help plan future strategies and campaigns."

Azure Cloud Benefits SMBs

Change can be very stressful. With the Cloud, you're talking about changing the way you do business. That's not something to be taken lightly.

That's why we've pulled together the top 3 customer concerns for migrating to the cloud with Azure. This guide will help you ease your fears and concerns, enabling you to find the right architecture with the right balance of on-premises and cloud technology. Advised and serviced by: 

1. It's not trustworthy

"Businesses and users are going to embrace technology only if they can trust it." Satya Nadella, CEO, Microsoft Corporation. Many companies don't always think about specific cloud solutions and vendors. They just don't trust the cloud. Period.

Yet here's the reality - most people are already using the cloud in some sort of fashion in their lives today. Whether it's for binge watching their favorite TV shows, managing bank records, or making bill payments. The real message is that nothing is more important than a customer's personal information. If they're willing to use cloud services to manage their personal life, surely the business they're running can also realize some of those same benefits?

But just because they're using the cloud now, doesn't mean they fully trust it. Here's how you can debunk those perceptions and show that the cloud is safe:

·         Encryption. For data in transit, Azure uses industry-standard transport protocols between user devices and Microsoft datacenters, and within the Azure datacenters themselves. For data at rest, Azure offers a wide range of encryption capabilities up to AES-256, giving your customers the flexibility to choose the solution that best meets their needs.

·         Control. A hybrid solution lets the customer decide what gets stored on-premises and what goes to the cloud. Information can be moved back and forth between these options as they see fit. Microsoft takes strong measures to help protect customer data from inappropriate access or use by unauthorized persons, and to prevent customers from gaining access to one another's data.

·         Global standards. Microsoft solutions and services are built on a Trustworthy computing foundation consisting of security, privacy, and reliability. Microsoft creates, implements, and continuously improves security-aware software development, operational, and threat mitigation practices, and shares this knowledge with government and commercial organizations.

Microsoft engages in industry-leading security efforts through its own centers of excellence, including the Microsoft Digital Crimes Unit, Microsoft Cybercrime Center, and Microsoft Malware Protection Center. Microsoft continually collaborates with industry and governments to build trust in the cloud ecosystem. 

2. The cloud is the same, regardless of who I choose 

In the broadest sense, yes, public clouds do the same thing. But once you start to dig a little deeper, public clouds can be very different. This is a great opportunity to position Azure above the competition. And here are just a few pointers to help you have that conversation:

·         Azure offers a complete hybrid solution, so you can debunk that "all-or-nothing" customer assumption and explain how starting small – such as email migration, or data backup and recovery – can be implemented without forcing a complete overhaul of existing processes.

·         With Azure, you can move virtual machines "as-is" back and forth between on-premises and the cloud. Companies get a consistent experience everywhere without having to invest heavily in dismantling their existing infrastructure.

·         Azure supports the broadest selection of devices, operating systems, databases, languages, frameworks, and tools. Azure's integrated tools, unified services, and proven solutions help you build enterprise, mobile, web, and Internet of Things (IoT) apps faster, for virtually any platform or device.

·         There's no steep learning curve with Azure, unlike with Amazon Web Services (AWS). As you can choose from a vast array of third party tools, solutions, and partner-developed applications via the Azure marketplace.

·         System management tasks are automated, enabling developers to focus on apps using Azure's Platform as a Service (PaaS) solution, the underlying Operating System (OS). This leads to faster on-boarding to the public cloud and lets customers quickly develop apps.  

·        Microsoft matches AWS pricing for all commodity public cloud offerings. And, Azure brings more compute capacity than AWS in the instances we offer; so Azure beats AWS on a price-to-performance comparison. 

3. We'll have to redesign our applications

Moving any application into the cloud will require some level of redesign or re-architecture of the solution, that's inevitable. The beauty of leveraging hybrid cloud is that the same Hyper-V Virtual Machines (VMs), for example, that is running on-premise or through another third party cloud can easily be moved to Azure, and will run without needing to make modifications on Azure VMs. 

We can leverage the free 30 day trial of Azure Site Recovery to migrate your on-premises physical Windows/Linux servers, on-premises Hyper-V VMs, and/or on-premises VMware VMs up into Azure with ease. If they are migrating on-premises VMWare VMs then Azure Site Recovery will convert the VM to a Hyper-V as part of the migration. 

Gartner 8/3/2016

Microsoft

Microsoft is a large and diversified technology vendor that is increasingly focused on delivering its software capabilities via cloud services. Its Azure business was initially strictly PaaS, but Microsoft launched Azure Infrastructure Services (which include Azure Virtual Machines and Azure Virtual Network) into general availability in April 2013, thus entering the cloud IaaS market.

Offerings: Microsoft Azure offers Hyper-V-virtualized multitenant compute (Virtual Machines), with multitenant storage, along with many additional IaaS and PaaS capabilities, including object storage (Blob Storage) and a CDN. The Azure Marketplace offers third-party software and services. Enterprise-grade support is extra. It has a multi-fault-domain SLA. Colocation needs are met via partner exchanges (Azure ExpressRoute). See the In-Depth Assessment for a detailed technical evaluation.

Locations: Microsoft calls Azure data center locations "regions." There are multiple Azure regions in the U.S., Canada, Australia, India and Japan, as well as regions in Ireland, the Netherlands, Hong Kong, Singapore and Brazil. There are also two regions for the U.S. federal government. (The two Azure China regions are part of a separate service operated by 21Vianet Group.) Microsoft has global sales. Azure support is provided in English, Dutch, French, German, Italian, Spanish, Japanese, Korean, Mandarin and Portuguese; support for Azure IaaS capabilities is also available in Hebrew. Technical documentation is available in those languages, as well as Russian. The portal is additionally available in Czech, Hungarian, Polish, Swedish and Turkish.

Recommended mode: Microsoft Azure appeals to both Mode 1 and Mode 2 customers, but for different reasons; Mode 1 customers tend to value the ability to use Azure to extend their infrastructure-oriented Microsoft relationship and investment in Microsoft technologies, while Mode 2 customers tend to value Azure's ability to integrate with Microsoft's application development tools and technologies. Azure is frequently chosen for strategic adoption by organizations with a strong commitment to Microsoft technologies.

Recommended uses: General business applications and development environments that use Microsoft technologies; migration of virtualized workloads for Microsoft-centric organizations; cloud-native applications (including Internet of Things applications); and batch computing.

Strengths

• Microsoft Azure encompasses integrated IaaS and PaaS components that operate and feel like a unified whole. Microsoft has been rapidly rolling out new features and services, including differentiated capabilities. It has a vision of infrastructure and platform services that are not only leading stand-alone offerings, but also seamlessly extend and interoperate with on-premises Microsoft infrastructure (rooted in Hyper-V, Windows Server, Active Directory and System Center), development tools (including Visual Studio and Team Foundation Server [TFS]), middleware and applications, as well as Microsoft's SaaS offerings. Microsoft is also becoming more open and less reliant upon its Windows franchise, and Azure's support for Linux and other open-source technologies is improving quickly.
• Microsoft's brand, existing customer relationships, history of running global-class consumer internet properties, deep investments in engineering and innovative roadmap have enabled it to rapidly attain the status of strategic cloud IaaS provider. Microsoft is aggressively pushing Azure into its customer base, and discounting to promote adoption. Azure is growing quickly, and is in second place for market share. Microsoft has pledged to maintain AWS-comparable basic cloud IaaS pricing for the general public; and, on a practical level, customers with Microsoft Enterprise Agreement discounts obtain a price/performance ratio that is comparable to AWS. Although Azure is neither as feature-rich nor mature as AWS, many organizations can now consider it "good enough," and base their vendor decision on factors other than technical capabilities.

Cautions

• While Microsoft has met its promised time frames for introducing critical features that help Azure fulfill enterprise needs for security, availability, performance, networking flexibility and user management, not all such functionality is implemented with the level of completeness, ease of use or API enablement that is desired by enterprise customers. These difficulties are exacerbated by disorganized, incomplete and sometimes out-of-date documentation, as well as a support organization that is not always capable of solving complex implementation challenges, a limited number of Azure experts outside of Microsoft (whether consultants or potential employees) and few options for Azure training.
• Microsoft is still in the process of building out its Azure ecosystem. It has been aggressively recruiting managed service and professional services partners, but many of these partners lack extensive experience with the Azure platform, which can compromise the quality of the solutions they deliver to customers. Many such partners do not take advantage of cloud-native capabilities, reducing the value their customers receive from Azure. CMP vendors and MSPs report challenges in working with Azure, particularly in the areas of API reliability and secure authentication, which are slowing their ability to deliver solutions. 

Microsoft's Dynamics 365: Understanding the Common Data Model

http://www.zdnet.com/article/microsofts-dynamics-365-understanding-the-common-data-model/

Microsoft Dynamics 365: New roadmap, licensing details revealed

http://www.zdnet.com/article/microsoft-dynamics-365-new-roadmap-licensing-details-revealed/

Microsoft Makes A Cloud Push With New Dynamics 365 Software Suite And App Store

http://www.forbes.com/sites/alexkonrad/2016/07/06/microsoft-makes-cloud-software-push-with-dynamics-365/#5b6428b0cedd