Essentials for Office 365 now provides a unified backup for Exchange, Sharepoint and Onedrive, all the major applications where content lives.

Washington D.C.-based Metalogix, which makes cloud management software to migrate, manage and secure content across enterprise collaboration platforms, has enhanced its Metalogix Essentials for Office 365 solution with new backup and data protection for Microsoft Exchange.

Metalogix is focused around adding a layer of value to the Microsoft productivity stack, especially around SharePoint management.

“We have a little under 400 employees, a broad spectrum of use cases and customer sizes, and a variety of different verticals,” said Damon Tompkins, Senior Vice President of Corporate and Business Development for Metalogix. “Our customers go from the Fortune 50 to emerging small companies, as the product set is applicable in a very elastic way, and is priced that way as well.”

Metalogix’s Essentials platform manages the entire lifecycle of users and their collaboration content, and facilitates migration to Office 365 through a single solution which manages email, files and SharePoint.

“This is the biggest migration in the history of compute, as Office 365 is the fastest growing product in Microsoft history,” Tompkins said. “Most companies contact us to move to the cloud, but they also use us for tenant to tenant activity and the consolidation of legacy systems. Just moving the data isn’t enough value, from our perspective. So we also provide information about metadata, provide licensing efficiencies in seeing who isn’t using the software, and optimize backup and storage for tiering and archiving.”

Tompkins said that Essentials is also valuable for the management of onboarding and offboarding, especially for large organizations which can have 50 people entering or leaving the organization every day. The solutions helps get them on to or off the systems and contends with the digital footprint they leave behind.

“We see a shift from systems to service management underway in which it is critical to deliver the right types of collaboration, around two predominant areas – the user (tenant) and metadata – for knowledge work and the asset it creates,” Tompkins said.

Metalogix benefits through a unique relationship which Microsoft, in which they are embedded into Microsoft Consulting Services and written into services engagements.

“They have standardized on our product set, to reduce friction in the onboarding to the Microsoft cloud,” Tompkins added. Metalogix’s own sales are about a 50-50 mixture of direct and channel.

“Usually when we engage, there is a channel partner involved from a services perspective,” he said. “We often work with partners who are interested in evangelizing but who don’t actually sell the product because they are interested in the services. We don’t do services and look to partners for that.”

The major change with this version of Essentials is that administrators can now backup and restore content from Exchange Online Mailboxes while normalizing the data.

“Essentials already had SharePoint backup, and now has Exchange backup as well,” said Adam Levithan, Product Manager, Metalogix. “It now provides a unified backup for Exchange, SharePoint and OneDrive, backing up the major applications where content lives.”

This version also adds flexibility to migrate to multiple cloud services, and enhances the management of all user attributes – license, permissions, content – to facilitate management of the entire collaboration content lifecycle.

Metalogix’s Diagnostic Manager, which provides monitoring, diagnosis and troubleshooting of the SharePoint environment, has also been enhanced. The UI now has a single ribbon, and will generate faster response times. Email alerts on the status of Office 365 services have also been added, and monitoring of SQL AlwaysOn has been improved.

The Essentials platform is also fully compatible with the SharePoint 2016 beta, bringing the functionality across all versions of SharePoint.