Microsoft continues to educate partners of Office 365 in Chandigarh

The DQ Week tech caravan continued to explore more cities and this time Chandigarh, known to be an upcoming high potential economy, was again on its list. Emphasizing on the benefits of cloud and vis-à-vis Microsoft Office 365 in the DQ Week Tech Caravan, Microsoft apprised partners about features of the product and delineated its benefits. The event was held on 1, August 2014 at The Regent.

Sanjay Kathuria, head-north, Microsoft cloud business gave an overview of the different cloud business services like platform as a service, infrastructure as a service and software as a service. Bringing Microsoft into the picture and propagating cloud over on premise solution, Kathuria mentioned that on-premise solutions have high capital expenditure; service unavailability during migrations; lack of trained manpower; lack of best practices and no free upgrades. Whereas cloud has lot of benefits, mentioned Kathuria.

MS Office 365, a cloud based productivity solution, has essentially four components under it: MS Exchange, Office, Lync Online, and SharePoint. It is cloud based architecture; has geographical redundant datacenters, multi device and mutli platform access, market accepted solutions, free upgrades and most importantly 99.9% financially-backed SLA, according to the literature available on the product.

Some of the partners including Pradeep Chakravarty of IT Infocom asked why one should move to cloud when on-premise is selling well in the market. On this Kathuria mentioned that recurring costs can be avoided on the cloud services and it also saves customers from time n again investments. He said, "Now the partners have to sell the software on EMIs."

Kathuria also demonstrated on the new intelligent features of MS Excel in the Office 2013.