“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.

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?