For organizations who live in a VDI world (read: Citrix), it has not been a straightforward proposition finding a place for Microsoft’s new cloud-based version of Office.
For the SMB and home users, the adoption of Office 365 has been fast and it made sense – because these folks run apps locally on their machines. But for mid-market organizations who have built an infrastructure framework that delivers apps and data to virtual desktops from a centralized data centre, this new approach presents a family of issues that Terminal Services and VDI was supposed to have solved years ago – preventing the support hassles and security worries of having users running apps and data on their local machines. It’s completely doable, but requires a fundamentally different approach from the reference architecture so commonly associated with a VDI environment. Now, after more than 5 years of testing and over 20 separate PoC mini-projects and testing scenarios, we’ve found a cool home for Microsoft’s Office 365 products. We’re delivering the licensing and performance advantages of Office 365 inside of our managed virtual desktops! A true hybrid cloud solution for the future!
We have been integrating Office Products with VDI (on VMware, Citrix, and Microsoft platforms) for 2 decades—in fact, our founders did the first Citrix Install in this country! When we told our clients that ‘O365 is NOT ready’ we had our reasons. And talking to peers, we saw concerns about uptime, recoverability, supportability, performance, and device vs. user licensing. We’ve got all that sorted out and the technology is performing wonderfully. The short story is that after long chats with our partners at Microsoft, we are fully authorized to start packaging Office 365 inside of our managed desktops.
Curious about your options when it comes Microsoft Office, your journey to the cloud, and the future of productivity for your workforce? Give us a call and we can help you with the roadmap.
