Preparing for MS Office 365? Soarsoft assists Microsoft partners and customers to ease the pain of enterprise migration

As bandwidth has become increasingly affordable and available in South Africa, local businesses have begun to embrace cloud computing and all of the benefits it offers, particularly around access to technology at an affordable price. One of the latest cloud offerings, Microsoft Office 365, enables organisations of all sizes to leverage the power of multiple Microsoft tools as a hosted service, paying a monthly subscription rather than a capital outlay. However, migrating these environments to the cloud can be a complex process. Soarsoft Africa is gearing to assist local resellers and their customers to migrate to Office 365 with ease, using its ‘tool box’ of technology, expertise and experience in this niche area.

Microsoft Office 365 provides a complete online and desktop experience by utilising a set of integrated services hosted on Microsoft data centres. The services include Exchange Online for email; SharePoint Online for websites, document sharing and central storage; Lync Online for online meetings and PC to PC communication; and SharePoint Workspace which keeps documents synchronised to the desktop and allows for access to documents and email from any browser, or to use a compatible client across a range of devices.

“With more and more users having access to multiple devices and wanting to work across these devices from anywhere in the world, moving to Microsoft Office 365 is a logical step for many businesses. However, migrating content from Exchange, File and SharePoint as well as legacy data from archive platforms and public folders can be a challenging task for resellers and their customers wanting a fast and secure journey to the office 365 Cloud.

Soarsoft offers resellers a range of solutions and training on products that are ideal for assisting with Office 365 migrations, including best of breed tools from Binary Tree, Metalogix and TransVault. We also have years of experience in dealing with complex SharePoint, messaging and archive migrations to and from different platforms and vendors.  As such we are ideally positioned to assist organisations with the move to Office 365 which in many ways is very similar to what we’ve always done for organisations with complex environments long before the popularity of cloud solutions,” says Chris Hathaway, Director at Soarsoft Africa.

The BinaryTree toolset is specially designed to meet the challenges of migrating to the cloud, simplifying and accelerating such projects. The E2E Complete offering is ideal for Exchange migrations to Office 365, as it creates a migration workflow process that facilitates end-user communication, minimises end-user downtime, and dramatically enhances project management capabilities.

Metalogix Migration Manager for SharePoint enable users to copy data back and forth between the cloud and on-premise which is ideal for hybrid cloud SharePoint architectures. Operations can be scheduled and then run at any time to create a two-way sync option, perfect for Office 365 SharePoint Online functionality.

TransVault Migrator enables organisations to move legacy third party archive data directly into the Office 365 Exchange online service without compromising the accessibility or integrity of their email records.

“Despite slow uptake in South Africa, cloud computing is without a doubt a big part of most organisations future, and we are beginning to see an increasing number of products and services move towards a hosted model. With more than a decade of archiving, migration and messaging expertise and an extensive toolbox of services for Message Archive, SharePoint and Exchange co-existence and migration, we are well prepared to assist resellers and their customers to migrate to Microsoft Office 365 and the other hosted service providers,” Hathaway concludes.