Episode 177 – Friends Should Let Friends Buy Microsoft 365 Business Premium

In Episode 177, Ben and Scott break down the changes in Microsoft 365 Business Premium and how it compares against Office 365 Enterprise Plans including the Office 365 E3. Transcript Email Download New Tab - [Ben] Welcome to episode 177 of the Microsoft cloud IT pro podcast recorded live on May eight 2020. This is a show about Microsoft 365 with Azure from the perspective of IT pros and its users where we discuss the topic or recent news and how it relates to you. In this episode, Scott and Ben take a more detailed look at the recently renamed and improved Microsoft 365 business plans and discuss with these updates, should friends now let friends by business? Everybody now his kids and dogs and all sorts of things or people or animals making noise in the background to their meetings. - [Scot] Yeah, I think we're all getting better at it though, so maybe for those who haven't been doing the remote thing now that they've had a couple of weeks to not necessarily settle in to it, but experience it and recognizing that for some of us it's going to be coming for a long time. I think especially for technology companies, I mean Facebook announced that through the rest of 2020 just go for it. - [Ben] Really, I missed that. - [Scot] Yep, yep, go forth and do it. Amazon is at least October, Microsoft still has their campus effectively shut down. So it's gonna be a thing for a while and I think for us, like in this segment and this area, we're going to continue to experience it. - [Ben] Yeah, although to be fair, I've been experiencing it for like 10 years now. - [Scot] Yes. - [Ben] My kids literally don't know what it's like for me to have to leave the house for work. They get upset when I have to leave to go to work. They're like, "Why do you have to leave?" Some people do these everyday guys. - [Scot] You've done it again. - [Ben] Yes. They just don't know what it's like to have daddy actually leave every day to go to work. - [Scot] Man, you know, they'll have to figure out their own lives at some point, you know, let them grow up in flutter and all those things. - [Ben] What it is. Yes, they'll realize it. Maybe, who knows? Maybe everybody will work for home for the rest of their lives. I think you are gonna see a lot more people or companies staying open to remote work 'cause this is forced everybody to figure it out. I know there's some people I've talked to that they're like, "This just does not work for us. "We're not as productive." All of that, we need to be at the same spot. But I think there's a lot of companies that are also realizing, "Hey, this isn't as unproductive "or as bad or as prohibitive to our daily activities "as we thought it was." - [Scot] Yeah, interestingly, I also think lots of folks are gonna have to figure out the burnout factor and really starting it and mass in this time is a different thing then all of a sudden a company you phasing into remote work or just easing your way into it and figuring out what that balance is for, what is productivity at home? I think a lot of folks who are potentially looking at their teams and saying, "Well, we can't work remotely," oh, that's not attitude 'cause you're gonna have to figure out a way to do that in a lot of cases. And also by saying you can't, you're automatically throwing up a barrier to being successful there, but being able to align those times and boundaries between work and home life and recognizing that, yeah, this other thing is going on in the outside. - [Ben] Yeah, it's interesting and there's definitely a difference between being forced to work remotely and like you said, having that gradual roll and have it being an option. I would say there's more challenges with the way it happened this way. Well, it has opened up a lot of eyes. It also is a lot more challenging when you do it this way. Than if it, like you said, it's a gradual roll in a gradual rollout, you start with options and just do it a little bit at a time. Doing it this way definitely has brought a whole set of challenges. - [Scot] So one of the little things that gets me, is I have an established place to do work every day. I have my desk, it has my monitors, there's a nice warning ring on the desk where my coffee cup goes. There's a place for the keyboard, a place for my mouse, microphone, all those kinds of things. And my wife potentially transitioning to a remote role as a teacher. She's kind of settled on just one or two different places in the house to work in. And I've offered, like last night she's been working on an extra class and trying to do all these recordings for her students and things so she can put them up. So she came into the office and was sitting at my desk, which I'm normally on a laptop, but then it's just in clamshell plugged into all these monitors and she brought her laptop stand-in. She brought her keyboard in, brought her mouse in and she sat, stood up, it's a standing desk. So she stood up at the desk and I said all we gotta do is pull that little USBC cable out of my laptop and we can put it into yours and you could at least have the keyboard. And if you don't want the keyboard, keep using your keyboard 'cause that's all Bluetooth, that's fine. I get, you don't wanna use somebody else's mouse 'cause everybody's kind of partial to things like that, but you can totally use your keyboard and just all of a sudden have these screens like go ahead, have the 34-inch monitor and things like that. And she looked at me like I was crazy just like I couldn't be productive like that. I'm like, I couldn't be productive on a single screen. - [Ben] Yeah, it's everybody figuring out how they work best. As IT professionals in the cloud era, sometimes it feels like we don't speak the same language as the rest of the organization. So when stakeholders from finance or other departments start asking about a specific project or Teams Azure costs, they don't always realize how much work is involved in obtaining that information. Sifting through cluttered CSVs and complex massive metadata in order to manually create custom views and reports. It's a real headache. On top of helping you understand and reduce your organization's overall Azure spend. ShareGate Overcast lets you group resources into meaningful cost hubs and map them to real-world business scenarios. This way you can track costs in the way that makes most sense with your corporate structure, whether it's by product, business unit, team or otherwise. It's a flexible, intuitive and business-friendly way of tracking Azure infrastructure costs and it's only available in ShareGate Overcast. Find out more on sharegate.com/itpro. So we have an interesting topic. This topic today, speaking of working came up probably about a month ago now. I think this has been out and I saw some articles about it and we kind of put some notes together and were like, "We should record this at some point in time." So today is your lucky day Scot. - [Scot] Every day is my lucky day when I get to talk to you, Ben. - [Ben] Aw, that's so sweet. That was a little weird. Now you got me all thrown off. It's been a long week. So we recorded an episode a while back. I don't even remember which episode it was where we said, "Friends do not let friends by business "when it comes to office 365," and we had a whole list of reasons why. About a month ago, Microsoft made some announcements that we talked about, about renaming the business 365 skews. And as a part of that, one of the, I would say new skews with some added features to it is you can now get Microsoft 365 business premium, which includes Windows 10, office 365... well no, that'd be Microsoft 365 business standard, I believe it's one of the Microsoft 365 business skews as well as essentially EMS. You're getting Azure active directory premium. So you get all three of those for $20 a month, which is the exact same price as a office 365 E3 plan. So a lot of people have been asking, "Why would I buy office 365 E3 for $20 "when I can get Microsoft 365 E3 "or Microsoft 365 business premium for $20 a month?" Why would I not get that one with all these other features, Windows 10, Azure active directory premium, it's essentially all the EMS stuff. Although we're gonna talk about, it's not all of that. So do friends still not let friends buy business or have they changed this enough that Microsoft 365 business premium is actually a very solid option now where you're not quite as handicapped as maybe you were before. So we figured we'd dive in, discuss that. There was also a blog article that came out around securing remote work, tying into our intro to using Microsoft 365 business premium. - [Scot] And then that article really piggybacks and the concepts there piggyback kinda whole cons the licensing construct where they added Azure AD premium P1 to those licenses. So having access to conditional access I think ups the game and changes it a little bit. 'Cause that's one of those differentiators between those two skews. - [Ben] It really is. And before it was always an Add-on and now all of a sudden it has come bundled. So we decided this episode, we're just gonna talk about Microsoft 365 business premium and where it actually does make some sense now. I think my opinion, we'll see what Scott thinks. As well as scenarios where frankly it still doesn't make sense even though there's more features to it as opposed to like the E3 plan. - [Scot] Yeah, let's get into it. - [Ben] Alright, so where do you wanna kick it off? How do you wanna kick it off? - [Scot] So I tend to look at it from one of those clear differentiators between those business plans and the enterprise plans is the number of users that you can bring into those skews. So having a hard cap on the number of users, like if I was gonna build out a decision tree to say,...