Charities and not-for-profit organisation in Australia find themselves in the fantastic position of being able to claim free Office 365 services (for a cloud package), plus very low prices for advanced add-ons. This constitutes a significant gift that should allow organisations to provide much better IT services, while slashing costs.
The main free service is a private Office 365 environment (called a ‘tenant’) that includes Exchange Online, SharePoint Online and Lync (now Skype for Business). These services can be used with an existing Office Desktop product (as long as it is at least Office 2007). The immediate benefits for organisations will be:
- Ditch on-premises Exchange and get better email and collaboration services for free
- Reduce or eliminate on-premises IT equipment and services
- Expand services beyond head office, with seamless remote access
- Secure Document Libraries in the Cloud
- Unified Communications across the organisation (video conferencing, chat etc.)
For many organisations, the free product alone will suffice to provide a very real boost to services, but some will also want to take advantage of inexpensive add-ons, such as:
- Office Professional Plus for desktop (for those who want to replace their existing Office product)
- Office 365 Enterprise E3 (for those needing advanced Exchange features such as legal hold and limitless archiving).
- Other products such as Microsoft Project and Visio
To find out more about this, including whether your organisaiton is eligable and how to make it happen, please contact us, or just give me a call on 0400 141330: