InterlinkCloud

Today’s businesses are ever more dependent on their Firstline workers. A Firstline worker is someone whose main job is focused on creating or delivering a company’s product. This could be workers who interface directly with a customer or those employees building your product on the manufacturing floor. These Firstline workers frequently have been under resourced with technology. Many companies find it difficult to justify paying the same price for software subscriptions for a Firstline worker versus a traditional knowledge worker, when Firstline workers spend very little time in front of a computer. Microsoft recognized this challenge and began offering Kiosk plans. Those plans first evolved into the F1 plans and now Microsoft includes the F1 plan into their brand-new Microsoft 365 (M365) F1 bundle. The M365 F1 offering includes three major pillars – Office 365 functionality; a scaled down version of the Enterprise Mobility + Security Suite; and Windows 10. Microsoft has priced this product aggressively, which is less than a third of the cost of the regular Microsoft 365 E3 or E5 plans, while offering all the features and security your Firstline worker needs to be successful.

“Immutability” is the industry-standard term for “preserving data in the system so that it is discoverable and cannot be destroyed or altered."

With Exchange Server 2016 with Enterprise CAL or Exchange Online Plan 2 (included in Office 365 E3 and Office 365 E5 plans), Microsoft enables organizations to preserve individual or all mailbox items for discovery natively, keeping those items within the Exchange infrastructure. This approach is called, In-Place hold.

One significant benefit of hold - as opposed to separate, read-only storage - is that items are preserved within the Exchange infrastructure. This preserves more of the information, including metadata, and makes management easier for IT admins. Users benefit because they can manage their mailboxes using the familiar Outlook interface. From an IT-perspective, In-Place Hold eliminates the necessity and complexity of maintaining a separate infrastructure and potentially storage for Exchange items.

In your hectic need-it-now, always-connected, running-to-meetings business life, trying to keep up with all the content, communications, and interactions you face daily can be overwhelming. Shifting between the multiple applications, email inboxes, and social media sites that you need to access to do your job can dramatically stifle your productivity and efficiency.

Microsoft has helped to streamline this information overload with Teams, the collaboration solution that consolidates your applications and communications in one place. Teams provides a clean, easy-to-use interface that provides easy access to the tools and sites you need to use all day long. It is being viewed as an integration point to the functionality in Office 365.

Firstline Workers – a workforce comprised of over 2 billion employees including retail sales associates, hospitality staff, medical workers and teams on the manufacturing floor - are often the first and only representation of your brand with your customers. To help transform and empower this workforce, Microsoft Office 365 offers two specific licensing plans that were designed to foster culture, collaboration, and teamwork through technology enablement at a much lower cost per user.

The first plan is the Office 365 F1 licensing plan (a replacement to the K1 Kiosk plan). It was created for deskless workers – users who are often working away from a desk or using a shared PC and don’t need desktop versions of Office. The other plan is the E1 plan.

Office 365 can be an incredibly powerful tool. However, there are times when more automation is needed than comes out of the box. Whether it is the need to automate a workflow, simplify a process, or just have an easy to use application, Microsoft PowerApps looks to fill this gap by allowing organizations to easily create their own solutions which can include Office 365, third party, and home grown applications. So, what is PowerApps and how easy is it to use within an organization?