rhipe has created a series of tips and tricks to help you, our partner optimise and fine tune your deployments. Our aim is that these tips help to provide cost and operational efficiencies.

rhipe with support from Microsoft has created a team of experts dedicated to increasing Microsoft Modern Workplace Cloud Solution Provider (CSP) program benefits, reducing your business risk, optimising your deployments, and costs to drive greater value for you and your customers.

We understand the impact on your business and your clients during challenging times and we want to do all we can to help. Our key objective is to ensure business continuity for you and your customers so we have created a list of 5 tips and tricks focused on cost savings, usage improvements, and innovative solutions that will help fine tune your customers’ infrastructure.

A few years ago, we wrote a blog titled No one should sell Exchange online Plan 1 or SharePoint Online Plan 1 to their customer where we explained that most of the standalone offerings in the Microsoft CSP program do not represent value for money.

Highlighting that a slight increase in the total spend per user per month will allow the user to upgrade from Exchange Online Kiosk / Plan 1 to either Microsoft 365 Business Basic (Office 365 Business Essentials) or Office 365 F1. This will enable them to communicate and collaborate with co-workers more effectively and work more productively.

Today, this is still the case. However, there are still tips and tricks that your customers can adopt to further optimise their spend on Microsoft MWP licences while not impacting productivity and performance.

How can we help?

These fields are required:

    Thank you for contacting rhipe. By submitting your information, your details will be handled as set out in our Privacy Policy and you agree that rhipe may contact you. You may opt out from receiving communications from rhipe at any time.

    5 Tips & Tricks to Optimise Microsoft MWP

    Explore these tips and tricks and reach out to the rhipe team for more advice on the best way to implement these changes.


      1. Convert mailboxes of users who have left the organisation to a shared mailbox
      2. Switch to the new Microsoft 365 F1 SKU, or Exchange Online Kiosk
      3. Replace Office 365 E3 with Microsoft 365 Business Premium
      4. Review your customers' current back up requirements to minimise storage requirements to save costs
      5. Replace other security and productivity solutions with Microsoft 365 Business

    1. Convert mailboxes of users who have left the organisation to a shared mailbox

    When a user leaves an organisation, you can convert the user's mailbox to a shared mailbox, instead of purchasing a per user Exchange Online licence. All existing emails and the calendar of the user is retained. You will not need to purchase additional licences for the mailbox if the mailbox size is below 50GB. Once converted to a shared mailbox, several people will be able to access it.

    Later, a shared mailbox can be transferred back to a private user mailbox. For more details about how to convert a user’s mailbox to shared mailbox, please refer to the Microsoft documentation here.

    button.png
    2. Switch to the new Microsoft 365 F1 SKU, or Exchange Online Kiosk

    There was a time that all employees needed an email address, but this is certainly not the case anymore. Many frontline employees do not need email. They only need to engage with other colleagues using Teams or Yammer to find out what is happening in the organisation.

    If you need Teams and not email: Microsoft 365 F1 for users @ RRP AU$5.50 / US$4 / NZ$6.05 / KRW 4,500 / JPY 435 per user per month. This is almost half the price of the previous entry level M365 F3 SKU but includes EMS E3 as well.


    If you need email but not Teams: Exchange Online Kiosk @ RRP AU$2.75 / US$2 / NZ$3 / KRW 2,250 / JPY 217 per user per month.

    Please visit the Microsoft 365 Firstline (F-) plans: new entry-level offer and repositioning to learn more about the value proposition, an FAQ, comparison sheet and more.

    button.png

    3. Replace Office 365 E3 with Microsoft 365 Business Premium

    There are three main reasons why a customer should purchase Office 365 Enterprise E3 instead of Microsoft 365 Business Standard (Office 365 Business Premium).

    1. On-premise CAL rights to access on-premise exchange / SharePoint servers
    2. More mailbox storage in Exchange Online 100GB compared to 50GB
    3. Ability to use Group Policy to deploy Office ProPlus

    Key features of E3 are now available in Microsoft 365 Business Premium:

    See below for the full comparison table among Microsoft 365 Business Standard (Office 365 Business Premium), Microsoft 365 Business Premium (Microsoft 365 Business) and Office 365 E3.

    comparison.png

    button.png

    4. Review your customer's current back up requirements to minimize storage requirements to save costs.

    Complement your customer’s backup strategy with the built-in backup features in Exchange Online, OneDrive for Business and SharePoint online.

    For the Exchange Online mailbox, the default retention period for deleted items is 14 days. This can be increased to 30 days. If a user accidentally deletes an item, you can still recover it.

    For more details, please refer to the Microsoft documentation here.

    OneDrive for Business has a Time Machine feature that allows users to restore to any point of time within the past 30 days. If any of your OneDrive files get deleted, overwritten, corrupted or infected by malware your Office 365 subscribers can undo all the actions that have occurred, within the last 30 days.

    You can also use OneDrive to back up the desktop files of a user. For more details, please refer to the Microsoft support documentation here.

    Do you need to keep content for seven years? You can set a retention policy to retain content in SharePoint Online, OneDrive or Exchange Online for seven years or more, if users have the required licenses.

    Another option is your use the built-in backup feature that comes with Office 365. You could look at tweaking backup policies by either reducing their backup storage or remove unnecessary backup software, so long as you still meet their backup and retention policy.

    button.png

    5. Replace other security and productivity solutions with Microsoft 365 Business

    We mention Microsoft 365 Business Premium (Microsoft 365 Business) so many times that it may sound like we are promoting it. The reason it comes up so often is that Microsoft 365 Business represents the best value for money, providing your customers with a comprehensive solution that will meet their need for productivity, compliance and security. This is particularly important, after the recent announcement of the availability of full Azure AD Premium P1 on Microsoft 365 Business Premium.

    If your customer is using another cloud identity management platform, chat-based workspace, antivirus, email protection software or archival solution, then it is time to assess their subscriptions and look at moving to Microsoft 365 Business Premium.

    sumplify.png

    button.png

    © 2020 rhipe Ltd