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.

EA VS. CSP

Choice is critical in business, but sometimes it’s difficult to determine the best decision for your specific organization. Such is the case when it comes to contracting services for Azure and your other Microsoft cloud applications. For many years, the best choice for larger organizations was signing up for an Enterprise Agreement (EA) directly with Microsoft. However, now there is a new option called Cloud Service Provider (CSP), a contract you can purchase from a certified Microsoft partner.

Both offer similar services and similar pricing. There are advantages and disadvantages to both depending on your size and type of business. So, how do you decide what’s the right choice for your organization? Below is a look at the two options in several key areas.

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?

Hackers are dedicated to getting into and compromising your systems. They can use sophisticated coding techniques to get around or break through your security defenses. Unfortunately, many times that type of extensive effort isn’t necessary because organizations make it easy for hackers to steal credentials by failing to have adequate defenses in place.

Nearly two out of every three confirmed data breaches involve weak, default, or stolen passwords.¹ In total, according to Microsoft, tens of millions of credentials are exposed every month and are added to growing lists on the dark web. These stolen user IDs and passwords are extremely valuable to cyber thieves since three of every four users re-use credentials across multiple sites and continue to use the same credentials for years.²

For any organization, it is incredibly important to have a system in place that enables employees to be efficient and productive. In most cases, employees take it upon themselves to use applications, usually unknown by the organization, to help manage their tasks and collaborate with their teams more efficiently. This presents a big issue for organizations because their employees use unauthorized and potentially unsecured applications, which can result in the data leakage of secured documents. So, how do you enable your employees to collaborate effectively while making sure they are productive? Microsoft has you covered with their approach to the Modern Workplace and their integration of products such as Planner, OneNote, SharePoint, and many others into their collaboration tool Microsoft Teams.

So, what is Microsoft Teams? If you have not already read our blog Microsoft Teams | A Hub for Teamwork in Office 365, it's Microsoft’s new chat-based work space in Office 365 that brings conversations, content, and people together, all in one place, so they can easily collaborate more. It truly feels like the future of workplace collaboration with everything you need built right in.