Office 365 gives you on-premise licenses too!

As bigger customers look to refresh their current IT infrastructure, many are seeing Office 365 as a cost-effective way of doing so – but not just because they can move their users to the cloud.
Some organisations currently on Exchange Server 2003 or 2007 may want to move to Exchange Server 2010 but not completely to the cloud.
Others (such as one of our customers) may want to use the Business Intelligence features of SharePoint Server 2010 and allow all staff access to the output – but not publish the source information to the Internet.

A hidden gem of Office 365 is that it gives customers of the Enterprise subscriptions access to the equivalent Client Access License for on-premise use too.
While Microsoft’s tag-line for cloud is that they are “all in” this great approach to licensing & cloud means that customers don’t have to be all in if they don’t want to be. It’s another key benefit of Office 365 over Google Apps: flexibility (or: have your cake and eat it too).

You can read more in my latest post at BoxFreeIT.