It is a fast paced world, with everyone looking for ways to manage their personal and professional lives. There’s hardly any difference left between Sundays or any other week day. As for a professional, every day is full of tasks, pending assignments and much more. Amongst this, technology is continuously helping us to make our lives easier. Microsoft’s Office 365 is a perfect example of how technology is a great boon.
Microsoft Office 365: Making collaboration and communication easier
Office 365 is a complete blend of technology and efficiency. It is available in various subscription plans with access to applications and other productivity tools delivered over the internet through cloud. It offers services like Skype for Business, SharePoint, OneDrive, Exchange Online and many more, to improve organizational communication network and availability.
For Microsoft cloud service providers, selling Office 365 with a wide range of other Microsoft cloud solutions, stand as a lucrative option to increase the customer base.
Office 365, much more than a business communication software, is a productivity enhancer tool. It allows you to access your mails, share and store docs, and check as well as keep reminders of your tasks with in-built calendar; all this with anywhere access, thanks to the cloud! 🙂
With its tools like Skype for Business, you can conduct live meetings on the go, through video conferencing. Thus, with Office 365,you can create your own virtual office, wherever you go.
But “everything comes with a cost associated”. For managing your Office 365 suite, you need to adopt “the automation mode” of service delivery and provisioning.
Why selling Office 365 needs automation?
Office 365 has some operational intricacies related to provisioning and billing management. With a number of customers subscribed to your Office 365 services, it’s practically impossible to manage all accounts and licenses, in addition to their upgrade, renewal, and a lot more manually. Even if you make it possible, it will be a time consuming activity. And time is very important when it comes to the cloud. After all, one of the major promises of the cloud is “delivering on-demand services.”
Also, you cannot keep the entire burden on your technical team, they need to retain their focus for more important and innovative tasks.
Hence, to manage the complexities of Office 365 billing and service provisioning, you need “automation”. It can be an answer to all the issues we’ve discussed so far.
The automation of Office 365 means:
- Automation of complete customer lifecycle, including every activity from sales, billing to account management and support.
- Bundling the legacy services with Office 365; helping you sell your existing portfolios.
- Adding value to your service by creating customized solutions.
- Helping your partners to resell Office 365 to their customers.
To achieve this, you need cloud management platforms or business automation tools which can help you provision your service and automate the service delivery of Office 365.
Office 365 automation: Comparing major platforms.
Odin:
It is one of the premium cloud management and automation platforms. It helps the cloud service providers to get success with cloud in the digital economy. Its latest 7.0 version, comes with improved functionalities for managing services. Through Odin automation, you can easily automate your cloud services including Office 365 platform.
AppDirect:
AppDirect also stands as a good platform to sell apps and services managed on cloud. It not only serves a front end product but gives the flexibility to organizations to resell cloud. You can easily manage your Office 365 customer’s lifecycle with utmost ease. With Office 365 integration, you get notified about any new update and can get going with the latest developments.
RackNap:
A novel offering by the industry veteran- ZNetLive, RackNap stands as a perfect cloud and business management software. With inbuilt modules and APIs, it completely supports service provisioning of Office 365. In addition to managing the customer lifecycle, it gives you the flexibility to manage different customer billing cycles, be it monthly, quarterly or annually.
Your system admins can get a single view of all the business processes related to Office 365, while your customers get the power to manage their Office 365 licenses through the RackNap client panel. It gives an end-to-end Office 365 billing solution.
For Microsoft Office 365, RackNap’s various modules:
- Provide automation and service provisioning of Office 365.
- Provide technical support with inbuilt helpdesk and CRM platform already in place.
- Support all currencies, thus helping in managing customers across the globe.
- Manage complete customer lifecycle including management of billing, sales, inventory, andreporting.
- Provideyour admins with manual control – easy suspension/upgradation of services within few seconds.
- Provide your customers with power in their hands – upgrade/renew/add more emails in few simple clicks.
The following infographic shows the Office 365 API integration with RackNap and how it helps Microsoft CSPs to manage their entire services through this Office 365 automation tool.
Conclusion:
Automation solutions like Odin, AppDirect and RackNap help you to manage your Office 365 selling in a much streamlined manner. Now, which option should you select, depends on which one best suits your needs. Our recommendation is RackNap – as it offers end to end service provisioning and delivery, including all facets of your subscription business, in addition to your legacy services.