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Top Office 365 Resellers In UK

Office 365 Resellers In UK

Migrating to Office 365  is a critical step and process. You may need some serious hand holding to make the job easy. But don’t worry. We understand your problem and realize your need, so we did extensive research to find the best resellers for you.   This is our second post on top resellers. This time we are focusing on Office 365 Resellers In UK.

So, let’s look at who should be your primary considerations when you’re looking for a UK reseller.

If you’re looking for an Office 365 reseller with a global footprint, then Avanade could be one of your best bets. It is one of Microsoft’s biggest partners with offices in London and a presence in more than 70 locations in 20 countries. Avanade follows a comprehensive approach by assessing first whether Office 365 is really the right fit for your business and then moving to deployment with its accelerated migration services.

Avanade has deployed more than 2million Microsoft Office suites already and handled more than 3,000 SharePoint projects for 600 customers. It also provides other services like application development, CRM, analytics, collaboration, ERP and managed services.Avanade is a trusted Office 365 solution provider for leading brands like L’Oreal, Pepsi and Cable &Wireless Communications. It has also won more than 60 Microsoft Partner of the Year Awards, including seven years as a Microsoft Alliance Partner of the Year.

EACS is a 20-year-old, award-winning IT solutions and managed services provider serving businesses throughout the UK. EACS has successfully built partnerships with market-leading manufacturers over the years, which enables the service to provide businesses with the highest level of expertise and quality. It is headquartered in Huntingdon, Cambridge with regional offices at Temple Road, Rotherham, and it offers a variety of other services like training, project management, and security management to name a few.

EACS has received multiple awards such as the European IT and Software Excellence Award 2013 by IT Europa, Corporate Reseller of the Year 2009 by CRN Channel Awards, Mimecast Business Partner of the Year 2012, and it was selected as one of three finalists for the Microsoft Partner of the Year 2012. Some renowned brands that have used EACS services are Essex police, CHS group, Dako and Chard Robinson.

Specialist Computer Centre or SCC is Europe’s largest independent technology solutions company, mainly catering to mid-sized enterprises and public sector organizations. It is headquartered in Birmingham with 11 offices across the UK and has an international presence in France, Spain, and Romania. SCC has been in the business for more than 40 years and is one of the most accredited Microsoft partners in the UK. It has more than 100 consultants trained in supporting Microsoft solutions and technologies, and their competencies include security solutions, unified communications solutions, information worker solutions, and networking infrastructure solutions. SCC also offers other services like flexible resourcing, managed print services, data centre, supply chain services, and many more. It has won some prestigious awards like Best Staff and Community Schemeand and the Oracle excellence award.

Advanced 365 is a division of Advanced Computer Software Group and has been in the business since 1987. It has four offices across the UK in London, Somerset, Cobham and Langley and has an international office in Georgia, US. Advanced 365 offers a variety of other services like IT outsourcing, collaboration, security and compliance, application development, business intelligence and data services and IT strategy consulting. Advanced 365 was the first service in the UK to attain the new Gold Level Virtualization Competency. It also holds multiple silver level competencies for numerous other Microsoft technologies including Dynamics CRM 2011, SharePoint 2010 and Microsoft Business Intelligence. Recently, it was awarded with Microsoft Cloud Accelerate Partner Status. It has several leading brands amongst its clientele including Siemens, Oxford University Press, Mitsubishi and Mercerto name a few.

If you identify Dell as a leader in desktops, notebooks and peripherals manufacturing only then you would be surprised to know that it is also one of the largest distributors of Microsoft software worldwide.It has served major UK brands like Coats Plc where the challenge was to migrate 7,500 users in 70 countries from IBM Notes to Office 365 within five months. Dell completed the project successfully within deadline and reduced costs significantly by automating the migration process.

Dell has released a couple of tools like Notes Migrator for Exchange, Coexistence Manager for Notes and MessageStats, which enable businesses to migrate from Lotus Notes to Office 365 seamlessly. Recently, Coca-Cola Bottling Company United, Inc. (CCBCU) selected Dell’s migration solutions to move 1,100 user mailboxes and 2TB of data from IBM Notes to Office 365, and it was completed successfully within a weekend!

Migration is a challenging process, and you must choose a reseller carefully. Read our recent blog post on Office 365 Migration Best Practices to learn more about it. However, while you plan to migrate to Office 365, you should also consider the important point of backing up your Office 365 data. You may feel that it’s a default service provided by Microsoft, but if you loose online data the only back you have is the recycle been, and even that’s only good in case of a user error, and not for other possible reasons for data loss such as virus, or phishing and more. The recycle bean is a good backup only for 30-90 days. If you don’t recover your data within that period, you will lose it forever.

 Read more about the need to backup office 365 on CloudAlly’s  Office 365 Backup blog post.

SaaS Data Loss: Your Online Data Isn’t Safe.

SaaS Data Loss

Your organization might have important data stored in the cloud. From important statistics to data required for daily needs, your organization might rely heavily on the cloud for its day-to-day work. However, what if this data stored in the cloud is lost? Getting a cloud provider for storing your applications and data might just not be enough. Having a cloud provider for your application and service does not mean that you are protected from ALL types of data loss and actually you are much more vulnerable than you were when you worked on-premise. SaaS Data Loss is an issue for most organisations.

Here is a look at some of the possible reasons for data loss in cloud.

1. Data center of your Cloud system won’t  always retrieve your data

Spiceworks study reported that over 45 percent of respondents had reported data loss in their organization. Fourteen percent of those respondents said that they were unable to retrieve the valuable information they had lost. This is a common misconception. The data center of your SaaS provider won’t always retrieve your data. Read more

It’s World Backup Day – Have You Backed up Your Data Yet?

Have you ever been the scapegoat of an April fool joke? Must be, right? Or maybe you are so smart that you evaded being the target?

from www.worldbackupday.com

Unfortunately, this is the case with a lot of people playing with data every day and to address this exact issue, a  couple of reddit users took a wonderful independent initiative by making 31st March the World Back Up Day – a day to increase the awareness among people like you and me about the importance of regular backups, with an interesting tagline “Don’t be an April Fool.”

Of course, we shouldn’t think about backing up our data only once in a year but it works as a reminder that all of us should focus and make or review our back up strategy.

Let’s look at some stats to get a feel of how important backups can be. Read more

Microsoft OneDrive for Business – should you consider it?

Microsoft OneDrive for Business

The short answer is… yes, you should consider Microsoft OneDrive for Business.

Formerly called SkyDrive Pro, OneDrive for Business is Microsoft’s answer to Google Drive and others. As an integral part of Office 365 or SharePoint Server 2013, OneDrive for Business lets you work within the context of your organization and manage your work documents.

The most important feature is being able to share your file and collaborate with other people within your organization or partners outside the organization. Then there is the sync application that enables you to replicate a copy of your files at your local drive and edit either the local or the cloud copy.

Sometimes there is confusion between Microsoft OneDrive (formerly called SkyDrive) and Microsoft OneDrive for business. OneDrive is simply a cloud storage owned and controlled Read more

Database Optimization

Database Optimization

Sure it might be surprising, but for CloudAlly, we are first and foremost about… database optimization.
security, scalability, availability, functionality and user experience are a must in everything we do,
however, optimization is the secret and most challenging ingredient.

CloudAlly is all about simplicity and cost effectiveness. We aim to leverage the economy of the
cloud and make it work for our customers by providing them Read more

Office 365 – do we need to backup our own data?

Office 365 Backup Retention

Office 365 – do we need to backup our own data?

The short answer is… yes. Of-course our office 365 backup retention policy is required.

Let’s start from deletions.
What happens when you delete an email? You have 14 or 30 days to recover it from the dumpster and afterwards it’s gone forever.
If you have Office 365 plans E3 or E4, then you can set the dumpster to keep deleted emails forever. However, if the size of the dumpster is limited then the oldest emails will start to be permanently deleted…
If you have plans E3 or E4 though, you can configure the “litigation hold” per specific accounts and retain all deleted emails.
With SharePoint Online, deleted items are kept in the recycle bin for 30 days. But in case of malicious deletion Read more