Office 365 for enterprises: Part 5 - IT Control and Efficiency

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Control in enterprise IT is a balancing act. Automation and outsourcing save time and money, but if done wrong, can give up too much and make it harder to make technology work for your business. Office 365 is designed to provide the right balance, enabling you to get the value and streamlined management of the cloud while keeping control of the things that matter to your business. In essence, it allows you to offload the tedious, repetitive, time-consuming aspects of IT management such as server maintenance while keeping or even enhancing control over features, policies, and access.

 

One way that Office 365 keeps you in control is through effective communication and transparency. Today with BPOS, and continuing with Office 365, we have a service health portal, which provides up-to-date information on service availability. We've been listening, and we've heard loud and clear that customers want full transparency into the status of their service. This information will also be available through RSS feeds and other types of communication. Additionally, 24/7/365 IT-level support for enterprises provides you with access to the expertise you need to resolve issues, while you stay in control of the user relationship.

 

In terms of managing the technology itself, Office 365 provides a simplified, streamlined, Web-based management tool. You retain control over user management and service configuration so you can tailor services to the way your company does business. You can even automate management tasks and reporting using Remote PowerShell. Finally, role-based access control enables you to delegate specific capabilities to specialist users, for example, enabling a compliance officer to perform multi-mailbox search so IT staff doesn't have to.

 

These are just a few of the ways Office 365 for enterprises is going to help your business run smoother and make your life easier. But let's also hear from you! What traditional IT tasks are you most excited to offload? Software updates and patches? Hardware upgrades? Let us know in the comments below.

 

In our next post we will wrap up the Office 365 for enterprises series by covering how we provide robust security and reliability for your enterprise. For more from this series, visit the Office 365 blog.

 

-Allen, Office 365 Product Manager