Cloud integrator HubOne has introduced a self-service portal to help small businesses upgrade from Microsoft’s Business Productivity Online Suite (BPOS) to Office 365.
When it launched Office 365 in June, Microsoft said it would work with existing BPOS customers to upgrade them to the new hosted software suite within 12 months.
But according to HubOne managing director Nick Beaugeard, the upgrade requires IT administrators to perform several tasks that can be a challenge with small businesses that lack technical expertise.
HubOne's service allows IT administrators to log-in with their BPOS credentials to automatically generate emails with discrete hyperlinks for each user for free.
When users click on the hyperlink, the portal records information about their browser and operating system and generates a free report for the administrator.
Administrators can then choose to purchase a more detailed report that includes a custom, step-by-step guide to migrating from BPOS to Office 365.
The service costs $29.95 for businesses with up to five seats – regardless of the number of devices each user has – and $5 for each additional seat.
Beaugeard acknowledged that the portal could take some work away from channel partners that would otherwise be contracted to perform the migration work.
But the portal’s primary target was small businesses that could not afford the “partner consultancy price point” and did not have the expertise to perform the migration using Microsoft documentation alone, he said.
“We decided to do this because we were concerned that there was a potential for customers getting confused and becoming unsatisfied [with Microsoft’s cloud-based software suite],” he said.
Beaugeard said HubOne’s channel partners had “responded very well” to the launch of the service and many were in the process of registering to resell the portal.
As with its BPOS migration portal, HubOne offers channel partners a portion of the fee it receives from end-users.
Beaugeard said IT administrators would be encouraged to include the name of their Microsoft partner when registering. That partner would receive 20 percent of the fee.
IT administrators could also choose to work with a channel partner to migrate users from BPOS to Office 365 after receiving the step-by-step guide, Beaugeard noted.
As of Friday afternoon, the service had 20 customers representing a total of 3500 users.
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