As you will read in the mail below, ENGIE is preparing a ‘sponsoring’ of Office 365 for 2 years, probably starting in January 2016.
You see also that I will need to give feedback before the 21st of September about the amounts of licenses that we plan to use in Tractebel Engineering worldwide, at least if we want to benefit from this sponsoring … (on this point, I hope that Amanda and Veerle give us some input: what with the actual licenses? does it mean that we renew all licenses … (and probably we have even no other choice then to go this way at a certain moment)).
I ask you to help me to get this estimation of amounts of Office 365 licenses right. And I ask you also to think about this shift towards Office 365.
In TE Belgium we are almost ready to offer Office 2013 to the users that want to start with that version of Office. We don’t push people, but we allow them to install it (via an app catalog). We expect that most of the users will stay in Office 2010.
Taking into account that in 2016 we have this ‘opportunity’ to go towards Office 365 (which will include actually the Office 2013 version), people that switch already in the coming months to the ‘normal’ Office 2013 should not be ‘afraid’ for another switch in 2016. Also the people that stay in Office 2010, will not be confronted with steep learning curves …
We will surely communicate on this in TE Belgium, what the options are.
Officially the International Standard Operating Environment (the supported operating environment in which all applications are supported), keeps on containing Office 2010 as Office version. We will add in the iSOE soon Office 2013 (without removing Office 2010 of course).
You see also in the mail below, that a difference is made between a E1 and a E3 license of Office 365. The description of the differences between the two licenses (in the mail below) isn’t probably complete … but my point of view is that for the engineering business we will probably need E3 licenses (allowing already the full installation on the fat clients … for example).
In this matter I need your input also. Make an estimation of the number of E3 licenses (and maybe also E1 licenses, for people for whom it is sufficient?) that you need in the period 2016-2017. If the number changes during this period (I suppose that most of us cannot predict that easily …), please say so.
If you see other aspects that are important in this matter, please say so.
We are aware of the fact that testing will again become important during the next months, but as I said, the fat client Office 2013 will probably be the ‘cornerstone’ of the Office 365 for the first part of 2016.
There are already some regional TE companies that have acquired experiences with Office 365. Also Trasys uses for its own purposes already Office 365. If you think that there are things to mention, please send them to me. I will then list them up, and will regularly inform everybody in To and CC about this. (I propose that I try to group the information). We emphasized towards the people already using Office 365, that no TE data should be kept in the public cloud. Our strategy is still that TE data are by default kept inside the TE network. We will surely discuss on this in our international meeting in November 2015 in Brussels.
I expect your answers at latest on the 15th of September.
I asked Mrs. Torrents to inform us also about price estimations: what is the extra cost for a E3 license? What will be the full cost after 2 years? When I get this information, I will forward it.