Microsoft Pricing is Going Up, but We Can Help Get Your Money’s Worth

We just wanted to provide a public notice that Microsoft intends to increase the price of its Microsoft 365 and Office 365 offerings. If your business relies on these tools in its operations, you can expect to see your costs for them go up, regardless of where they are sourced from.

That’s the bad news. The good news is, we can help you get the greatest mileage out of these solutions… potentially by introducing you to capabilities that you have yet to take advantage of.

Let’s dive into this concept a little more.

To Be Clear, Microsoft is Increasing their Prices… Not Us

Regardless of the provider you work with, these price hikes will wind up influencing your costs—simply because it isn’t coming from us, or any particular IT company. Wherever it is you source your Microsoft subscription through, the price will go up.

Having said this, not all sources will necessarily provide the same experience.

Why You Should Turn to BlackCSI for Microsoft Solutions

In short, we’re deeply familiar with Microsoft 365 and Office 365, and that familiarity enables us to give you the most value from your subscription. Microsoft offers a lot of tools and features that some businesses might not use independently. For instance…

Microsoft Teams

As Microsoft’s dedicated collaboration platform, Teams offers a business with a singular place for its users to communicate and work together. With a comprehensive set of tools all united for your team to use, Microsoft Teams enables your team to work together more easily and more effectively, to boot. Teams also offers integrations with various other services, and provides an assortment of features for itself. With collaboration so important to a business, these tools are immensely useful.

OneDrive

You’re likely familiar with Microsoft’s free OneDrive storage. OneDrive for Business is the enterprise version, offering your team the opportunity to share the documents they work on, accessing them from a variety of devices and browsers. OneDrive—effectively, a more private version of Sharepoint, which we’ll discuss next—gives your business a collaboration and backup solution in one go, allowing different users access to different resources and documents based on their permission levels.

Sharepoint

As we said, Sharepoint and OneDrive offer many similar features, as both allow document sharing to take place. However, Sharepoint can be seen more as an intranet solution, enabling you to share information with your employees and create process-based applications—with many other web-based business applications playing nicely with the platform. It’s an extremely versatile collaboration tool with endless possibilities for a growing organization.

Microsoft Bookings

Scheduling business appointments can be largely seen as a necessary business evil. While important, jumping between a task and assisting someone in setting up a meeting is a real productivity killer. Microsoft Bookings provides your business with a platform to pass this job off to the client. Instead of the back-and-forth needed to find a suitable time, a prospect can conveniently claim a time slot without interrupting the day’s workflow.

Azure Information Protection

It’s fair to say that we harp on and on about data security… for good reason, of course, but we do talk about it a lot. Azure Information Protection provides an additional layer of defense to your data—specifically, that which you share outside your company. With comprehensive access permissions providing full control over who can access your data, Azure Information Protection gives you an easy way to make your necessary collaboration far more secure.

Intune

Mobile device management is an increasingly important consideration, considering how many mobile devices now factor into a business’ technology. Capable of controlling your business’ data on either a company-owned or employee’s device under a Bring Your Own Device policy, Intune ensures that your business can remain secure while embracing the benefits of mobilized productivity.

Power Automate and Power BI Pro

Automation is certainly a hot topic in the business world nowadays, largely because it offers businesses the opportunity to accomplish more in the same amount of time. Enter Microsoft’s Power applications: Power Automate and Power BI (short for Business Intelligence) Pro. WIth Power Automate, a business has the opportunity to chain together different processes and different applications with no coding required to make sure that the crucial background tasks that would otherwise eat into your business’ time are seen to. Power BI Pro helps to automate your business intelligence gathering, sorting through your existing data to organize it in a way that encourages new insights and conclusions.

We’ll Help You Put Your Resources to Optimal Use

Whatever platform you elect to use, our team is here to help you make the most of it… particularly in terms of the bang for your buck. To learn more about these features, or other opportunities you have to improve your business’ processes, give us a call at (717) 620-3042.