Microsoft Azure is a public computing platform that provides organisations access to cloud services for networking, storage, analytics, compute, and more. It comes in various forms such as Infrastructure as a Service (IaaS), Platform as a Service (PaaS), and Software as a Service (SaaS). Azure offers organisations to "pay-as-you-go", which means you are billed only for what you use on a monthly basis. Learn more about Microsoft Azure here. 

Microsoft 365, (formerly Office 365) on the other hand, is a Software as a Service (SaaS). It provides users access to office productivity apps for email, collaboration, communication, file storage, and more that they can either install on their desktops or access on a web browser. Microsoft 365 includes applications such as the well-loved Microsoft Office, SharePoint for content and collaboration, Teams for chat-based communication, Exchange Online for email, Yammer for company-wide communications, and lightweight version of Power Apps, Power Automate, and Power BI. It also has built-in security that helps you provide a productive and secure remote work environment for your people. Learn more about Microsoft 365 here. 

Contact us 1800 126 499 or email us at enquiries@pa.com.au for more information. 

Microsoft Office 365 integrates natively with other Microsoft applications such as Azure, SharePoint, Viva, Dynamics 365, Power BI, Project Online and more. It can also easily integrate with other third-party applications or any on-premises business application you are using with a little help from Power Platform. 

If you are looking to integrate your existing systems to Office 365, there are many ways to do this. The most common is via web services.

Contact us to talk more about your specific requirements so we can best guide you on the approach to be taken and any limitations you may need to consider. 

With the E1 subscription, you don't get the Microsoft Office client, just the browser-based Office web apps for Outlook, Word, Excel and PowerPoint. You can, however, use an existing version of Office. The minimum supported version is Office 2010 with some reduced functionality compared to Office 2013 and 2016.  E1 also includes email, file storage (OneDrive for Business), real-time collaboration (SharePoint), communication (Yammer) and instant messaging and online meetings (Teams). 

E3 Subscriptions include all the features in E1 with Microsoft Office apps available on desktop, web and mobile.  It also has continuous automatic updates to the latest Office version and includes services for Power Apps, Power Automate, Power BI, Stream, and ToDo. 

All Office 365 subscription plans have built-in security for single sign-on, multi-factor authentication (MFA), data loss prevention (DLP), eDiscovery, and more. 

Learn more about Office 365 (now Microsoft 365) here.

Yes. Depending on your user structures you may wish to mix between an E1 and an E3 and or other combinations of plans including cost-effective frontline users. 

Contact us at 1800 126 499 or email us at enquiries@pa.com.au if you need further guidance on Office licensing. 

Yes. The education sector can take advantage of significantly reduced pricing and not-for-profits even have software grants from Microsoft. Learn more about the available Microsoft Nonprofit offers that you can take advantage of today in this blog.

Please contact Professional Advantage at 1800 126 499 to discover how much you can save. 

The great thing about Office 365 is Microsoft have put sharing at the centre of the platform. Click the Share button to a site or a document and Office 365 will guide you through a couple of simple options relating to whether you wish to provide read only or editing rights to the content. No need to reconfigure firewalls or ask IT to assist with sharing content externally.

Yes, the end user can create and enable links for external sharing in Office 365.  To disable it, they need to go to the individual document and turn it off manually.
You can also automatically control access with Azure Information Protection to automatically expire access to the document. his feature is available in Microsoft 365 which you can activate in a few clicks in your management portal, or via two PowerShell commands. 

Related Information: 

Watch how Azure Information Protection can help you protect your documents no matter where it ends up. 

While Delve can assist with a visual scan of your recent documents (and other Peoples (that you follow) recent documents (that you have permission to view), it doesn’t assist filtering numerous documents authored by numerous people across the organisation.  Leveraging content classification/metadata/tags, can be powerful when faced with a myriad of documents and you quickly need to filter down to the exact one you are after. This is simply one example of the importance of a good Information Architecture. (But Delve is cool none the less!)

The great thing about OneDrive is you get 1TB of storage per user - regardless if its a personal/home license or OneDrive for Business. You can access your files on the go with any device synched to your OneDrive and you can securely share your documents only to those people who have permissions to access or view your files. 

It is important that you people are educated and governed in what content is saved to their OneDrive account vs Content that's tagged with metadata and more easily manageable and accessible for all your staff in a SharePoint Site. You want to avoid silos of information and OneDrive can present a minor risk in that regard. 

We can help you educate your people on the correct use of OneDrive through our training and change management services. Visit this page to learn more.

Yes – the easiest way is to use a data source with Role Level Security (RLS), such as Analysis Services.  With RLS, the Power BI service will apply that role level security, and users who do not have sufficient credentials to access the underlying data (which could be a query used in a dashboard or report) will not see that data.

If a user’s access to the underlying data is different from the user who created the dashboard or report, the visualizations and other artefacts will only show data based on the level of access that user has to the data.  If you do not have a RLS data source, when data is shared with other users (such as through a dashboard or report), the original credentials are used to access or display the data.

Many IT teams often tackle OneDrive first without a clear set of governance and compliance policies. Many companies consider governance as an afterthought when it should be one of the first things to consider before doing an Office 365 migration. This, along with other pitfalls you need to avoid can be found when you download our eBook here.

While Office 365 alone does not help you to become 100% compliant on policies the likes of General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) or National Data Breach (NDB) scheme, it does help ease your compliance journey. Available in your Office 365 subscription are built-in security tools that protect personally identifiable information (PII), using encryption, user logs audit, security scores and many more. You can read more about how Office 365 can help with your compliance obligations in this blog.

Available on your Microsoft 365 (formerly Office 365) Enterprise or Business subscription are several useful productivity apps that can help make work a lot easier for you. Apart from the popular and often-used Microsoft Office apps like Word, Excel or PowerPoint, there are a few more that you need to be aware of.

• SharePoint for content management and company-wide collaboration. 
• Teams for online conferencing, chat, and real-time communication. 
• Yammer for enterprise social communication platform.  
• Planner for assigning and monitoring tasks. 
• Power BI for self-service reporting and analytics. 
• Power Apps and Power Automate for low-code application development and business process automation. 
• Stream for storing and playing videos. 
• Forms for online surveys and polls, and many more.

If you’re an existing PA customer, we can help you discover these apps through our scheduled quarterly consulting visits.

Office 365 can also help you with your compliance obligations with built-in security and data governance. Read more about it in this blog.