Page 61 - MS Office 365 for Dummies 3rd Ed (2019)

Because Microsoft is making the service available on a monthly basis, you have the greatest flexibility of all. You sign up for the service and begin using it. No need to go through a deployment phase. Exchange Online is already deployed and ready to go.
The Office 365 product is actually a bundle of products, and Microsoft is continu- ally adding more. There are Office 365 plans for home users, Office 365 plans for work, and Office 365 plans for education. The products in your bundle depend on the plan you choose. If you sign up for an Office 365 For Work subscription, some of the products you might have in your bundle are the Office productivity suite, SharePoint, Exchange, and Teams. For more about the different plans available, see Part 6.
Deployment predictability
Most decision-makers cringe when they hear the words “custom development.” You will hear horror story after horror story when it comes to a custom software development project. If you get really good developers who have been working together as a team and use a solid process (such as Scrum), then you might have extraordinary results and the best software available. On the other hand, you may end up with something that doesn’t do what you want it to do and costs 12 times what you thought it was going to cost in the beginning. In short, you can end up with a disaster. For this reason, many decision-makers want to remove the risk and go with packaged software. Because packaged software is already developed and only needs to be installed and managed, the risk associated with adopting the software is greatly reduced.
You will still hear horror stories, however, about the implementation process for packaged software. It generally falls along the lines that someone thought some- one else had configured the backups and the person who the other person thought had configured them had already left the company. Oh yeah, and the system was designed to be redundant so that if one key server went down everything would keep working. The only problem is that you only find out if everything works properly when something goes wrong. If the proper procedures were not followed during the implementation, then your organization may find itself in a very bad position.
Those with experience will say that it is often not the fault of any particular per- son. IT teams are overworked and stretched beyond their capacity to handle everything effectively. For this reason, using a SaaS is popular. With service-based software, another company specializes in managing the software and keeping it available, reliable, and backed up. You pay on a monthly basis and connect to and use the software over the Internet. This last realm removes the risk for chief tech- nology officer–type decision-makers (CTOs). Not only do they not have to pay
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