Microsoft Office 365: Introducing The Business Booster

Awawu Olumide-Sojinrin, Marketing Lead, Microsoft Nigeria, Emmanuel Onyeje, General Manager, Microsoft Nigeria, Marc Israel, Information Worker Business Group Lead, Microsoft Africa and Dele Akinsade, Developer Platform and Evangelism Lead, Microsoft West East and Central Africa at a press briefing to announce the availability of Microsoft Office 365 in Nigeria

 

There are some musings in some quarters especially amongst IT disciples that the sky is no longer the limit. Some IT freaks now see the Cloud as presenting every firm with a big and exciting opportunity to revolutionize their IT estate and realize ‘cloud economics’ by achieving more with less. Again, increasing simplicity yields greater productivity.

And if going by the features of a recent product introduced into Nigeria by leading global Software Company, Microsoft, then this thinking could well be true. Businesses in the country are in for rapid growth which experts argue could result to spontaneous national economic transformation.

Known as Office 365, the innovative product is a cloud productivity solution that simplifies IT management and provides virtually anywhere access to familiar Office tools, email, file sharing, conferencing, and many more services.

Businesses in Nigeria can now leverage on the good features of Office 365 to get their work done securely and communicate real-time from almost anywhere. In fact, when combined with office, Office 365 full potential is unlocked as the best solution for productivity, collaboration, communication, and worry-free IT.

Commercially made available in Nigeria about three months ago, businesses can try it for free for 30 days by signing up at the office website or from Microsoft’s 31 leading local Nigerian service providers. It will integrate Office 365 with other offerings and market the service to the hundreds of thousands of small and midsize business customers in Nigeria.

Office 365 for instance, helps professionals and small businesses to grow with Office Web Apps, Microsoft Exchange Online, Microsoft SharePoint Online, Microsoft Lync Online and an external website in just 15minutes.

Office 365 for enterprises has an array of choices for midsize and large businesses, as well as government organizations. It also includes the option to purchase Microsoft Office Professional Plus desktop software on a pay-as-you-go basis, for the first time.

These tools put email, voicemail, enterprise social networking, instant messaging, Web portals, extranets, video conferencing, web conferencing and more at everyone’s fingertips.

The new product is quite rich with varieties of business-boosting offerings. For instance, while Office offers all the familiar tools including Word, Excel, PowerPoint, Outlook, and OneNote on your computer, Office 365 comes with Cloud-based

professional email, video conferencing and Instant Messaging (IM); allows you to share files inside and outside your organization, allows for easy and secure administration, ensures financially backed reliability as well as predictable monthly costs with no up-front infrastructure costs.

You can use Office 365 with many versions of Office or even without Office on your computer.

At the launch of the product in Lagos, Marc Israel, Information Worker Business Group Lead at Microsoft Africa who explained the potential business impact of Office 365 during a hands-on demo said the product provides the productivity backbone for modern businesses in Africa.

According to him, “The introduction of Office 365 to Nigeria has the potential to fuel business and economic transformation across the region by delivering cost-effective, flexible access to enterprise-class IT.”

Israel noted that Office 365 does not require businesses to change the way they do business because the product uses familiar tools including Word, Excel, PowerPoint and others, adding that the cloud-based productivity suite also allows users to collaborate on desktops, tablets and smartphones.

With Office 365, employees get new ways to work together with ease, on virtually any device or mobile phone, and businesses get the reliability, security and IT controls they need in the cloud, even without a dedicated  IT staff.

Only last year, the service was introduced in limited beta with enthusiastic response, particularly among small and midsize businesses. Over a few months, more than 10,000 organizations around the world, many of which were small and midsize businesses, signed up and began testing Office 365, creating one of Microsoft’s largest global beta programs for businesses.

Emmanuel Onyeje, General Manager, Microsoft Nigeria noted at the launch: “We are evolving from the information age to the collaboration age, where the ability to take action on information will set successful businesses apart from the rest. The launch of Office 365 in Nigeria will accelerate that evolution by delivering enterprise-grade collaboration for all businesses - large and small.”

Testimonies are already flowing in from across industry professionals for this innovative product.

Abiodun Atobatele, Managing Director and Chief Technology Officer, ATB TechSoft Solutions who sees the new product as a game-changer remarked thus: “We thoroughly evaluated other cloud productivity offerings in the market before choosing Microsoft. Office 365 is the right choice to help our company support the way people work today and encourage a more mobile work environment. With the service, we have the added benefit of working together with familiar tools on almost any device and can make quicker decisions when needed.”

Chuma Chukwujama, Chief Executive Officer, AlliedSoft on his part said, “When AlliedSoft learned about Office 365, we knew this was the way businesses would work in the future. Not only can businesses save money, but our Nigerian customers are going to be able to work together better -no matter where they are.”

Already, Microsoft is building a massive partner ecosystem around Office 365, which includes new ways of partnering with service providers such as telecommunications and hosting firms.  Combined, the partners will integrate Office 365 with their existing services – from Web hosting and Internet connections to finance solutions and mobile phone services. These partners will then be able to deliver integrated packages to their customers, creating a one-stop-shop for small and midsize businesses seeking business services.