Despite the general positivity towards cloud, there are those who still have lingering doubts.

Future Decoded is the annual Microsoft event where business leaders gather to learn about the technologies shaping our future. At the centre of it is the cloud. During Future Decoded 2017, we carried out a survey to identify attitudes towards the cloud, key perceived barriers to adoption and priorities for the coming year.

Our findings showed that there were 3 key barriers to cloud adoption perceived by the participants:

Has there been a change in your business structure? Maybe you’ve acquired a new company or changed strategy. If these changes call for different services, just how do you deal with that?

In this episode of the CharDaveShow, we ask “where do I stand if I want to cancel my Office 365 licence?”

Different roles and work/lifestyles have different requirements, so not everybody wants the same technology. Luckily, Office 365 is extremely flexible.

See what you can do, now that Microsoft has developed a Dynamics 365 (CRM and ERP) app for Outlook. You can: set records with one click; add Outlook tasks, phone calls and appointments directly to Dynamics 365 and; track your Outlook contacts and link them to Dynamics 365 accounts.

Find out more about the benefits of Microsoft’s CRM in this white paper: “33 ways sales teams benefit from Dynamics 365”

With Dynamics 365, Microsoft has moved the goal posts in favour of your sales team. This new cloud technology not only gives teams great tools for lead qualification, preparing quotes and pipeline management, but it also gives you:

• Sales-minded dashboards for insights and data you can share and act on
• Re-usable templates to share with the team
• Collaboration tools
• Integration with other apps like Excel and Skype
• Business process customisation so it works like your organisation does

For more information, go to Dynamics 365. You may also find this blog useful: “Understand your sales performance with Power BI and Dynamics 365”.

This is a killer question, since Office 365 applications are generally business critical. Imagine the cost to your business of half a day with no email!

Video transcript

OK so another big part of any service is how reliable is that service.

Well there’s the million dollar question of course. Microsoft have over the last few years, published a lot more information on their uptime and there are some great resources that you can go and have a look at. So just got some information here, the Trust Centre. If you search for Microsoft Trust Centre and have a look there, you’ll find lots of information about how they supply their SLAs, how they measure their SLAs and their recent reporting. There are two other things as well that are worth noting. They have an admin app that (when you’re a user) will give you any alerts of any service affecting issues and they have a Health Centre where you can see what’s going on in your own particular application. So for the last couple of years, to answer your specific question, Microsoft guarantee an uptime of 99.9%. So what does that mean? Across a year we have something like 8,800 hours in total. So Microsoft are guaranteeing across a whole year that there would be a maximum of just over 8.5 hours downtime in total across the year. In the last two years, the average has actually been much better than that. They have actually achieved a 99.98% average uptime, which is just 1.45 hours downtime across a year as a whole. So really, it’s a business critical service and you’re getting a very high level of performance.

It’s great to hear they’re taking it so seriously and I think the other thing to note as well, is that those SLAs are financially backed. Which is another thing that shows how much confidence Microsoft has in its own services.

Traditionally, there was quite a disconnect between the Microsoft world and the Mac world. But those dark days are over.

Video transcript

So, in times past there was quite a disconnect between the Microsoft world and the Mac world. Things have changed and moved on, particularly in terms of Microsoft’s Office 365. How does licencing on Macs now work?

Good news. Windows and Mac: exactly the same licencing, the only difference is that if you get the Office suite as part of your licence, you will get the option to download the Office for Mac package, which is either 2016 or 2011. So again, the licencing has no difference, it’s just the Office suite that you will get to change.

Very simple.

Interviewed at Microsoft Inspire 2016, Toronto, Canada: hear why Cloud Direct founder and CEO Brett Raynes attends Microsoft Inspire events to prepare for the future.

After last year’s brain-filling Inspire event in Toronto, Canada, Cloud Direct will be travelling to Microsoft Inspire 2017 in Washington DC this July.

There, alongside other Microsoft global partners, we will find help with collaboration, innovation and building a visionary future for our businesses.

Video transcript

Why should partners come to Microsoft Inspire?

Brett Raynes, CEO and founder, Cloud Direct said:

“In general, to become inspired about all the innovations that are going on, what we can do to transform our business. We’re a partner with Microsoft and we’re switching everything over to the Microsoft stack, so it’s a great place to come and learn about everything that’s going on so you can plan for the future.

“In fact, last year I came on my own for the first time and it was so good and there was so much information that I couldn’t disseminate it all to the company. So, I brought four people with me this year just to spread the word. So it’s just to learn and absorb everything that’s going on.

“I think it’s spending time with the right people. Not just Microsoft, it’s partner to partner networking. There’s so much to do, you can’t do it all yourself. That realisation that it’s more of a web – it’s not a hierarchical thing – it’s more a multi-dimensional web.

“I think my brain is full. Completely full of new ideas and technologies, something we can take back – all the principles and technologies we can apply to our own business – how to weave change, because we are changing as well.

“The essence of empowerment. It’s about enforcing that, and starting with that message. And that consistency is important because if you believe in the partner – Microsoft in our case – then you can back it and invest in it because you believe there’s something there.”

Partners can register today at inspire.microsoft.com