Pillar 05 · Microsoft 365, Teams & Cloud

Microsoft 365, Teams & Cloud

Licences, Teams, Azure and migrations, set up properly and managed month to month. Simpler licences, lower recurring costs, spare seats you can actually see.

What it is

Microsoft 365 is the platform everything else stands on: sign-in, email, files, Teams, and increasingly the AI tools. Most problems we are asked to fix trace back to a tenant that was set up quickly and never revisited: licences drifting, security defaults left alone, files in the wrong place, servers kept alive out of habit.

We run the tenant as a managed thing. Licences are checked monthly and shown to you live. Security is a baseline, not a project. Migrations are planned so that people notice the improvement, not the move. And where a server still earns its keep, it lives in Azure, sized to the job, rather than in a cupboard.

Teams, done properly

Teams is in every Microsoft 365 subscription, and most companies use a tenth of it. Set up with thought, it becomes the one place for chat, meetings, calls and the files each team works on, tied to SharePoint and OneDrive so nothing lives in someone’s inbox. It can replace desk phones entirely. We run the adoption as a single project or as part of the managed service, so that every department is actually using it, not just the people who set it up.

Who it is for
  • Every company we work with runs on Microsoft 365. This is the base layer.
  • Firms moving from Google Workspace, an old server, or another provider's tenant.
  • Companies paying for seats nobody uses, or for Copilot nobody set up.
What is included

In plain words

  • Licences right-sized every month; spare seats shown in the portal
  • A security baseline on the tenant: multi-factor sign-in, conditional access, sensible defaults
  • Microsoft Teams set up properly: chat, meetings, files in one place, and your phones in it too if you want (see Voice & Connectivity)
  • SharePoint and OneDrive structured so people can find things
  • Phones and tablets managed: work and personal kept apart on the same device, company apps protected, a lost phone wiped
  • Migrations: from Google, from on-premises, from another tenant, without losing a day
  • Azure for the servers that still need to exist, sized to what they do
  • Copilot set up with the permissions and the policy to go with it
  • Backup of 365 data, because Microsoft's retention is not a backup
In the portal

How it shows up day to day

Your 365 licences are read live into the portal: what you pay for, who has what, what is spare. A new starter's licence is a request away, and the leaver's is released the same day.

See the portal →

Senior engineer

Owns the tenant: the security baseline, the migration plan, the exceptions.

Assistant

Shows spare seats, assigns the licence to the new starter, flags the account that has not signed in for 90 days.

The same job, both sides. An engineer decides; the assistant does the running around.
2006
Established
20
Years, and counting
3
London-area offices
6
Regions with client sites
8
Services, one agreement

Live service numbers, measured weekly and dated, are coming to this strip. We publish nothing we have not measured.

Questions

Questions people ask

Can you take over a tenant someone else set up?
Yes. The first job is a review: licences, security settings, who has admin rights, what is switched on that should not be. Then a list, then the fixes.
We are on Google Workspace. Will you move us?
Yes, mail, files and calendars, with a cutover at a weekend and both systems running until everyone is across.
Do you do Copilot?
Yes, as part of Managed AI. Copilot is only as useful as the permissions and the data underneath it, so we set those up first.
Why a subscription rather than buying Office once?
Because the subscription is the platform, not just the programs: sign-in, mail, files, Teams, security and the updates that keep them current, for a monthly cost per person rather than a purchase every few years. We keep the seats matched to the people, so you pay for what is used.
Can Teams replace our desk phones?
Yes. Teams Phone turns Teams into the phone system: your numbers, call queues and voicemail, on laptops and mobiles, with no box in the comms room. We run the adoption as a small project or inside the managed service.

Talk to an engineer about this.

A 20-minute call, no pitch deck.