Microsoft Azure is a public computing platform that provides organizations access to cloud services for networking, storage, analytics, compute, and more. It comes in various forms such as Infrastructure as a Service (IaaS), Platform as a Service (PaaS), and Software as a Service (SaaS). Azure offers a pay-as-you-go pricing model, meaning you're billed only for what you use each month.

Learn more about Microsoft Azure here. 

Microsoft 365, (formerly Office 365) on the other hand, is a Software as a Service (SaaS). It provides users access to office productivity apps for email, collaboration, communication, file storage, and more that they can either install on their desktops or access on a web browser. Microsoft 365 includes applications such as the well-loved Microsoft Office, SharePoint for content and collaboration, Teams for chat-based communication, Exchange Online for email, Yammer for company-wide communications, and lightweight version of Power Apps, Power Automate, and Power BI. It also has built-in security that helps you provide a productive and secure remote work environment for your people.

Learn more about Microsoft 365 here. 

Microsoft Office 365 integrates natively with other Microsoft applications such as Azure, SharePoint, Viva, Dynamics 365, Power BI, Project Online and more. It can also easily integrate with other third-party applications or any on-premises business application you are using with a little help from Power Platform. 

If you are looking to integrate your existing systems to Office 365, there are many ways to do this. The most common is via web services.

Contact us to talk more about your specific requirements so we can best guide you on the approach to be taken and any limitations you may need to consider. 

Yes. Depending on your user structures you may wish to mix between an E1 and an E3 and or other combinations of plans including cost-effective frontline users. 

The great thing about Office 365 is Microsoft have put sharing at the center of the platform. Click the Share button to a site or a document and Office 365 will guide you through a couple of simple options relating to whether you wish to provide read only or editing rights to the content. No need to reconfigure firewalls or ask IT to assist with sharing content externally.

Yes, the end user can create and enable links for external sharing in Office 365.  To disable it, they need to go to the individual document and turn it off manually.
You can also automatically control access with Azure Information Protection to automatically expire access to the document. his feature is available in Microsoft 365 which you can activate in a few clicks in your management portal, or via two PowerShell commands. 

Related Information: 

Watch how Azure Information Protection can help you protect your documents no matter where it ends up. 

The great thing about OneDrive is you get 1TB of storage per user - regardless if its a personal/home license or OneDrive for Business. You can access your files on the go with any device synched to your OneDrive and you can securely share your documents only to those people who have permissions to access or view your files. 

It is important that you people are educated and governed in what content is saved to their OneDrive account vs Content that's tagged with metadata and more easily manageable and accessible for all your staff in a SharePoint Site. You want to avoid silos of information and OneDrive can present a minor risk in that regard. 

We can help you educate your people on the correct use of OneDrive through our training and change management services.

Yes – the easiest way is to use a data source with Role Level Security (RLS), such as Analysis Services.  With RLS, the Power BI service will apply that role level security, and users who do not have sufficient credentials to access the underlying data (which could be a query used in a dashboard or report) will not see that data.

If a user’s access to the underlying data is different from the user who created the dashboard or report, the visualizations and other artefacts will only show data based on the level of access that user has to the data.  If you do not have a RLS data source, when data is shared with other users (such as through a dashboard or report), the original credentials are used to access or display the data.