EasySAM are delighted to announce that we have entered into a new partnership with Sonar Clarity, and their SaaS management platform.

Borne out of an evolving software landscape where SaaS is increasingly becoming the go to metric under which vendors offer their products, Sonar Clarity has been designed to simplify the management of this growing tech stack by unifying all of the information about your SaaS subscriptions (past and present) into one easy to view platform.

Having seen significant success in other European countries since their launch, they have now partnered with us to offer this emerging and exciting platform to UK based organisations.

Microsoft said Monday it is starting to roll out a faster new version of its Teams communication app for Windows to commercial clients enrolled in a preview program. The software will become available to all customers later this year, and Microsoft also promises new versions of Teams for Mac and the web.

Since its 2017 debut, Teams has become the jewel of Microsoft 365, the subscription-based productivity software bundle formerly known as Office 365. Companies rushed to adopt Teams to keep workers connected through video calls and text chats during the Covid pandemic. Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella said in January that more than 280 million people use Teams every month, even though many workers are again commuting to offices.

Microsoft Teams had some performance issues in 2020, which the company resolved. In 2021, with Teams usage still rising, Microsoft began building a second generation of the software with an eye toward improving performance, Jeff Teper, president of collaborative apps and platforms at Microsoft, said in an interview with CNBC.

Reports of a new version of Teams circulated earlier this year. Teper said this prompted “a lot of agitation” but that he did not want Microsoft to announce the update until the program had achieved an internal goal of being twice as fast as before while using half the memory as before.

The new version also includes enhancements meant to simplify Teams, building on the more than 400 feature updates Microsoft delivered last year, some of them meant to help Microsoft catch up with rivals, Teper said. Competition comes from the likes of Cisco, Google, Salesforce-owned Slack and Zoom.

Instead of displaying a kind of ribbon of functions for a chat, Teams will hide several options behind a plus sign that people can click on. It’s a concept people have become accustomed to on other messaging applications, Teper said. For example, in Slack, users can upload documents or set reminders after clicking on a plus sign under the area where they type messages.

During Teams video calls, the software will show every participant on screen in a box of the same size, rather than giving more space to participants with their cameras on. Until now, Teams calls have sometimes resembled Piet Mondrian paintings characterized by their squares and rectangles of varying sizes and colors, Teper said.

Microsoft is also adjusting Teams so that people who belong to multiple organizations can more easily stay on top of what’s going on.

“Instead of logging in and out of different tenants and accounts, you can now stay signed in across them all — receiving notifications no matter which one you are currently using,” Teper wrote in a blog post.

Corporate workers who get access to the new version of Teams will see a switch at the top of the application window that will enable them to go back to what Microsoft is calling the classic version, he wrote in the blog post.

Today we are announcing changes to our commercial pricing for Microsoft 365—the first substantive pricing update since we launched Office 365 a decade ago. This updated pricing reflects the increased value we have delivered to our customers over the past 10 years. Let’s take a look at some of the innovations we’ve delivered over the past decade in three key areas—communications and collaboration, security and compliance, and AI and automation—as well as the addition of audio conferencing capabilities that we’re announcing today.

More people than ever are working remotely which makes controlling IT asset usage more difficult. Compounded with IT spend becoming decentralised and more business-unit aligned, visibility is even harder to achieve.

That’s why Snow Software is evolving its product suite – and you can find out what that means for you in our webinar with them.

Watch our recording of the webinar to see how you can prepare for software license audits and get complete control of your technology spend.

Once a year you take the time to MOT your vehicles, those indispensible assets to you. So why not take the time to get a check up of other valuable assets, like software?

Our SAMplicity MOT is designed to not only give you insight into your Software Asset Management (SAM) Processes & Procedures, but also into your SAM program and strategy as a whole and the data it is comprised of. This service includes a 365 Health Check (powered by TBSC) to help optimise your Microsoft 365 estate.

The result is a clear scoring against the ITIL Standard with an improvement plan on how to manage your software assets optimally and cost effectively moving forward.

More people than ever are working remotely which makes controlling IT asset usage more difficult. Compounded with IT spend becoming decentralised and more business-unit aligned, visibility is even harder to achieve.

That’s why Snow Software is evolving its product suite – and you can find out what that means for you in our upcoming webinar with them.

On Thursday 18th March 2021 at 2.00pm GMT, join our exclusive Snow Spend Optimizer live webinar to see how you can prepare for software license audits and get complete control of your technology spend.