Table of
Contents
01
Problem Statement07
Office Professional Plus02
Business Challenges08
Benefits03
Solution09
Call to Action04
Exchange Online10
About Geocent05
Lync Online11
Contact GeocentProblem
Statement
IT is facing increased pressure to deliver agile solutions to end users that are mobile, secure, and scalable. More and more are turning to the Cloud to provide these solutions. Some of these reasons include productivity gains,
elimination of hardware, and reduced IT support, planning, and implementation labor.
“Office 365 delivered an ROI of 321% with a payback period of 2 months for the composite midsize organization”
– Forrester Research
Business
Challenges
Solution
By combining the Office Platform that drives today’s
businesses with the capabilities of the cloud, the enterprise is capable of providing reliable collaboration services that allow users to be productive anywhere, anytime, from any devices. Office 365 is made up of four major parts: Exchange Online, SharePoint Online, Lync Online, and Office Professional Plus 2013. It is through these tools that users can leverage the Office tools they are familiar with to collaborate in real time through email, instant messaging, voice, video, shared documents and more. This collaboration can be accomplished no matter where the user may be located. Office 365 provides a unified experience across platform and device allowing for the most flexible and comprehensive work scenarios
available today.
All of these services are hosted in Microsoft’s global datacenters, freeing up IT to focus on adding value back to the organization.
Office 365 ROI // 3
Exchange Online
External SMTP servers
Forefront Online Protection for Exchange
Edge Transport
Routing and AV/AS
Outlook
(local user) Phone System(PBX or VOIP)
Layer 4LB CAS Array CAS CAS CAS CAS CAS DAG MBX MBX MBX MBX MBX Line of business application Mobile phone Web browser Outlook (remote user) Enterprise Network AD
Microsoft Exchange has been the de facto enterprise mail, calendar, and contact platform for some time. It traditionally had a release cycle of every 2 years. While the current version, Exchange 2013, has worked to simplify the architecture of a highly available service it remains complex. It requires deep technical knowledge and capital resources to manage this mission critical application internally.
In an Office 365 deployment, Exchange Online provides a highly available, geo-redundant environment. This HA environment provides each user with 50GB of storage space and unlimited space for online archives.
“It costs us a considerable amount to guarantee 99.9 percent uptime for our Exchange servers. With Exchange Online, we can reduce those costs, and we gain time to perform other tasks.”
Lync Online
Microsoft Lync provides real time collaboration through presence, instant message, voice, and video communication. To provide all of these functions,
especially in a highly available capacity, a very complex server environment is necessary.
This environment, hosted internally would leverage multiple servers in an Edge Server Pool, multiple servers in a front end pool, and a mirrored SQL Server back end environment as well as other servers running additional roles for archiving and monitoring, mediation, reverse proxy, and the Exchange Unified Messaging role. In Office 365, this highly available, geo-redundant environment is all hosted and managed in Microsoft’s datacenters across the globe.
Office 365 ROI // 5
Central Site
Edge Server Pool
PSTN Gateway HTTP Reverse Proxy Mirrored Back End Servers
Front End Pool
SharePoint Online
Fault tolerance for simple workloads with small volumes of content
Two tiers:
• Combine front-end and batch processing servers • Database servers
Scale the number of servers as needed.
Front end and batch processing
<1,000 users
Databases
While we saw that Lync was more complex than
Office
Professional Plus
Microsoft Office makes up the fourth pillar of Office 365. Office Professional Plus distributed through Office 365 is the same Office suite delivered through traditional licensing models but with a twist. A major focus area of Office 365 is to provide solutions for the modern workforce that no longer adheres to the single device model. Often users will have a laptop, desktop, tablet, phone and home computer. Office Pro Plus in Office 365 shifts from a per installation model to a per user model. Each user has the ability to install Office Pro Plus on up to 5 devices.
The change to the licensing model also changes distribution. While this can be controlled by administrators, Microsoft has
added the ability for uses to download Office Pro Plus from the Office 365 portal. The installation leverages App-V streaming installation technology and once complete, users log in with their Office 365 account to authenticate their installation. If a user leaves the company or their license is revoked, the installed version of Office become read only unless another valid username is leveraged. This approach removes the need for Office license management by IT.
The change to the distribution model for Office 365 also changes the way that software updates are done. Updates are released every 30 days, just as with the rest of the Office 365 platform. These updates are streamed to the installed Office clients again leveraging the App-V technology. Users receive notification that an update has been installed and will be available the next time they open the application.
Benefits
• Office 365 extends the Office tools that already drive businesses. A locally installed Office suite as well as web based versions.• Enterprise mail, calendar, and contact sharing accessible from any modern platform or device.
• Enterprise-class security and reliability through numerous layers of security all backed by a 99.9% financial backed SLA. • Collaborate with one or many users through Lync Meetings with voice, video, document sharing, screen sharing, and more. • Collaborate with both internal and external users while
providing the security necessary in the enterprise.
“Everybody can use the same document at the same time. We’re able to view and make modifications together, collaboratively, and save them and forward them on at the same time to our clients.”
Call to Action
Try Office 365 through a FastTrack Pilot. The FastTrack methodology allows an organization to try Office 365 but when they decide to move forward the stages build out and no effort is lost. This methodology provides a smooth transition between trying Office 365 and full implementation.
Schedule a time for Geocent to discuss your environment and talk about what a full Office 365 deployment would look like in your environment.
Engage Geocent to leverage the Planning Service Days that were purchased with your EA to develop a full
migration plan for your team to execute or for us to work with you to deploy.
About Geocent
Metairie, LA (Corporate HQ) | New Orleans, LA | Baton Rouge, LA
Geocent is a full service information technology consultancy. We provide clients with motivated and trained technology consultants that are experienced in nearly every facet of information technology.
Geocent provides technology solutions across a wide variety of functional areas. Our clients include government; primarily defense, homeland security, aerospace and social services; and commercial industries such as oil and gas exploration, marine transportation, and healthcare. Through our
experience working with both government and commercial organizations, Geocent has developed the flexibility and expertise to meet a wide range of technological and engineering needs for different clients.
Contact
Geocent
Contact your Geocent sales representative today to discuss your environment and talk about what a full Office 365 deployment would look like in your environment.
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