If you’re still using the lower tiers of Microsoft Office365 for your company’s software needs, then you already know how valuable the apps and platforms are. What you might not know is that there are a lot of great features beyond the familiar apps that are included in the E3 license. Here are nine awesome features to look forward to when you upgrade:
- It upgrades your email storage size to a mighty 100gb per user inbox, instead of 50gb. If your company uses Exchange Online, you can also add “shared mailboxes” that get their own storage allotted in addition to the individual users’ mailboxes.
- It includes up to 1.5tb of space for archived emails, so that anything that’s not quite worthy of deletion doesn’t count toward the 100gb user inbox. If the auto-expanding archive setting is on, it will automatically increase the size of the archive as new space is needed.
- You can use Office Message Encryption (OME) to send secure messages and attachments up to 25mb. If you send a Word Document (or other supported formats) this way, that file can only be opened by the recipient, and the messages can be marked “Do Not Forward” to prevent leaking sensitive data.
- If your organization uses Exchange, then it uses Data Loss Prevention to automatically detect when an email has sensitive information in it (like credit card information or a Social Security Number), and lets you set the policy for what to do about it—such as educate the user or simply block the email.
- On SharePoint, OneDrive, and Teams, Data Loss Prevention protects your organization by letting you set policies that prevent sharing sensitive information with external or guest users. Again, you can set this to notify the user, or even to let them give the administrator a justification for sharing the information.
- We’ve discussed Teams at length on the blog before, but Crown Computers CEO Sean Goss had this to say about the service: “E3 allows the use of phones so that you can start using Teams to make outbound calls instead of using your cell or company phone. Crown enjoys using Teams in this way. We transitioned to Teams a few years back, and it is by far the best phone system we have used in two decades. It should be known that there will be a little extra expense for moving to a full-blown Teams Phone system, but E3 gets you 80% of the functionality.”
- It includes eDiscovery, a search tool that works for your mailboxes, Teams, OneDrive, and SharePoint data, all at the same time. If you find yourself needing to investigate an incident at your organization, you can search with metadata like timestamps and use Boolean phrases to pinpoint exactly what you’re looking for. Core eDiscovery (which is included in E3) lets you identify, hold, or export the data once you find what you’re looking for.
- It makes it easy for your entire organization to sign in by using Single Sign-On (SSO). By syncing your Active Directory or local server sign-on information, employees can be automatically logged in to Office 365 once they’re logged in to their workstation. Cutting out extra sign-ins helps cut down on problems like bad password hygiene and keeps your company’s data safe.
- You can make organizational retention policies that protect your data from malicious or careless users. This feature is often used for compliance purposes, but can also be used for other scenarios, such as a disgruntled employee who knows they are leaving the company. If they try to disrupt your data by deleting some on the way out, the user will think that they have deleted the files that they’ve targeted (so they don’t escalate their behavior) but the file is retained somewhere out of their reach.