Microsoft and Rackspace partner to offer more options and savings to Office 365 users

Microsoft is upping its storage and security offerings for Office 365 with help from a recent partner, Rackspace. According to a press release from a Rackspace Blog, users of both Office 365’s suite of productivity services and members of Rackspace’s community will now be offered cost-saving measures with both tools.

Three of the four new features, Archiving, Azure Rights Management and Extra Storage, can be added on to new and existing Fanatical Support for Office 365 solutions. Office 365 Exchange Online Kiosk is a stand-alone offering.”

The Rackspace Email Archiving feature can now save customers the added time of having to manually move email to archive folders by automating the process for Office 365 data. With access to unlimited retention and storage amounts as well as the new automated sorting tool, Rackspace customers should find an immediate benefit to the time vs. cost savings of Email Archiving.
Moving on to Extra Storage, customers now gain support and access to larger SharePoint sites with the increase to unlimited storage capacity for Office 365 SharePoint. Previously, customers were hamstrung with an arbitrary storage limit of 100GB+500MB per subscriber for Office 365 storage.
Lastly, customers will also have access to a stand-alone, browser-based version of Exchange. The new Office 365 Exchange Online Kiosk gives enables customers to receive and send mail without the need for the entire suite of Office 365 applications, and can be implemented alongside other equally important tools such as Business Essentials, Business Premium or E3. Office 365 Exchange Online Kiosk also comes bearing 2GB of storage, calendar and contact access and ActiveSync features that help port features to mobile devices.
Even though Rackspace and Microsoft seemingly compete and produce tools for a similar clientele base, the managed cloud computing space appears to be benefiting greatly with a partnership of the two, as of late.