In the past 6 month's I have started purchasing Office 365 Business in blocks of 10 for my companies Office solution. Recently, executive management decided that they want to migrate the whole company over to Office 365 Business Premium and utilize the hosted Exchange features. This means a migration from our on premises Exchange 2010 server to the O365 hosted exchange. Due to time constraints, and the desire to keep the cutover as smooth as possible, I've enlisted the assistance of my primary MS Partner to assist. The plan was to purchase the remaining seats to fill out our organization from our partner and UPGRADE the existing business seats to the business premium seats. We're planning to purchase all the licensing through the partner and also contracting with them to assist with the migration.
This is where my problem starts. According to our partner MS will not let them just upgrade those seats. We would have to either replace them with completely new business premium seats to replace the 20 we already own and migrate the users over. Or alternately I could upgrade them directly through MS but go to month to month model until this first year runs out.
Purchasing O365 in any flavor seems much more complicated if done through a re-seller/partner than if I just handle it in house direct with MS. Does anyone know of any benefit of pre-paying through the partner instead of managing it directly through the office365 portal?