Adding and activating new features to an existing tenant has several benefits for Partners. This will contribute to your partner capability score for the new Partner Designations, it increases your consulting stream and shows your end users that their Partner is keeping them up to date with technologies and tools that will help them.

 

One of the easier options to roll out is Teams. The features within Teams can be released to end users in bite sized pieces, rolling out just chat features with internal calling initially and then presenting additional features as customers realise how easy and cost-effective Teams is.

 

The nice thing is that Teams is built into all the Microsoft 365 Business plans and all the E plans. You can also purchase Teams Essentials as a stand only license, customers that felt they were being forced into more expensive plans from Exchange Online for example, can now choose to have a license option that doesn’t require a parent license to access the Teams basic feature set.

 

 

Microsoft has released Teams Rooms Basic for free giving accessibility and affordability to more customers without a license cost, its free…minus the cost to setup of course.  This is a great way to further expand your customers use of Microsoft business tools without a license expense for your customer.

 

Expanding your end customers use of existing license features should be something that all partners look at. As an MSP it's one of the easier ways to expand your consultancy revenue without the customer having to purchase more licenses.

 

Customers that are using M365 Business Premium for example, have you deployed all the features that come with this bundle. Why not? Even if they use another vendor for virus protection, what would be the problem with having two, configure Defender for the customer as well. Cyber Security is something you really can’t have too much of.

 

Just think about it, do in thought out steps, use MS guides to evaluate and deploy solutions in manageable stages. Don’t turn all the features on at once, especially if you don’t understand the ramifications of doing it. However, it’s a great way to keep your engineers engaged, keep up to date with what is available and it’s most certainly best for your clients to hear about features from you and not another partner.