Looking to upgrade your business desktop office suite? Perhaps your aging hardware is somehow being held hostage by ten-year-old software and you’re putting off that potentially disruptive transition that comes with changing horses in the middle of your business stream.

Microsoft cloud services could be the permanent solution to the foregoing conundrum. The cloud places software support in the hands of those who work at the product from gestation, to support, to upgrade. You, the customer, pay none of the development or upfront costs. When upgrades or patches inevitably come around, it is all done in the background, untouched by user clicks.

This is known as cloud SaaS (software as a service). Microsoft’s flagship SaaS is Office 365. If you’re already using MS Office locally, going to the cloud will be easy because you are probably using most of the applications already.

Depending on the subscription plan, you could even tap into more creativity enhancing applications than you presently have on your aging system. Perhaps it is time to convert those wide and deep Excel spreadsheets to the database power of Access, which is included in the desktop suite of Office 365 — without the extra cost.

Rather than the out-of-the-box one-size-fits-all offering, Office 365 subscribers can scale their subscription based on their needs:If you’re a small business, consider just the email, web conferencing, file storage, public website and much more as your fully supported online presence.

• Midsize (up to 300 users) and enterprise versions add the fully functional office applications: Word, Excel, PowerPoint, Office OneNote, Access, Publisher, Lync and InfoPath.
• Special category users — Nonprofit, Educational and government — are eligible for tailored suite and special pricing options.

The key benefits of Office 365 — aside from the fact that once you subscribe to this cloud service you’ll never have to upgrade ever again — are its agility and mobility. You subscribe to the plan that meets your business size, needs and future growth. Users have fully capable office applications on their desktop on any PC — including, with certain restrictions, on a Mac.

Want to learn more about the benefits of Microsoft Office and hit the ground running with this user-friendly and totally secure business software package? Contact us.