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5 Tips for Building a Business Case for Office 365

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Choosing the right cloud solution increases your organization’s efficiency, saves on technology costs and fosters your best collaboration. Microsoft provides Office 365 as a donation to qualifying nonprofits through its software donation programme. Office 365 provides a myriad of Web App tools on the cloud which can be accessed from anywhere. These tools range from the familiar, everyday Microsoft Word, Excel and PowerPoint to equally useful professional email, shared calendaring, instant messaging (IM), HD video conferencing, screen sharing, online storage, OneNote, SharePoint  and Lync.

Once you have determined that Office 365 is right for your organisation, it is likely that you will need to build a business case before you can migrate to Office 365. While the new nonprofit pricing model makes this easier, migration is not a zero-cost sum. There will be effort involved and factors to consider, such as whether you should upgrade Office on your PCs and whether your Internet connection is fast enough.

Here are our top tips on how to build a business case to migrate to Office 365.

Justify the migration by clearly stating the savings the organisation will make in the following areas:

  1. Reduce or eliminate server upgrades and refreshes – this saves IT support and server costs. Remember this cost saving is greatest if you migrate when your infrastructure is near end-of-life and needs replacement.
  2. Use of videoconferencing and teleworking to provide flexibility and reduce travel costs. Eliminating subscriptions to an existing teleconference subscription service can also provide substantial savings.
  3. Have protection from significant hardware failure – you do not have to worry about your server failing, or losing your data to theft or disaster. Also, highlight the privacy and security benefits that come with using Office 365.
  4. Realise efficiency savings that come from effective collaboration, independent of location.
  5. Save time from having a single source of truth from information and no longer have to search old email trails or the My Documents folder on different computers for a particular file.

To find out more about Microsoft’s Office 365 donation programme, please visit our Corporate Citizenship page here.