Microsoft has revamped its FastTrack service offering in an bid to get more small businesses to use its Office 365 productivity suite.

The offer is available to businesses with over fifty employees, who will be able to access resources from Microsoft’s FastTrack Center, and seek assistance from a specialist FastTrack team engineer to help them migrate to the cloud-based Office.

It’s not a new service from Microsoft, but rather an expansion of an existing program that was only on offer for companies with a minimum of 150 employees. Bryan Goode, a senior director of product marketing for the Office team at Microsoft, told Computerworld the change was motivated by a couple of trends it noticed when companies grow to fifty employees.

According to Goode, companies usually tend to hire their first full-time IT professional when they reach fifty employees. “It becomes their full-time job to make sure that the company’s IT infrastructure is stable, and robust, and basically fulfills the needs of the business,” Goode explained.

In addition, companies of that size usually have “more robust” IT needs, Goode said, adding that an Office 365 subscription really makes sense at this stage.

The FastTrack service was originally available for all Office 365 Enterprise, Government, Kiosk and Non-Profit customers, and will now be expanded to Office 365 Business and Business Premium (designed for small and medium-sized businesses) customers too.

Announcing the news, Microsoft revealed that it’s snapped up at least 50,000 new small and medium-sized business customers every month for the last 22 months. Last week, the company reported that sales of commercial seat licenses for Office 365 rose by 60 percent in the fourth quarter of 2015, compared to the same period one year ago.

Microsoft is actually following a two-pronged strategy to get more Office 365 customers. In addition to expanding FastTrack, the company said it would pay consultants and IT vendors who convince small businesses to switch to Office 365, once they reach specific usage milestones. The idea is that Microsoft’s partners will be tempted to push their smaller business clients to Office 365 in return for monetary incentives.

No doubt Microsoft’s renewed push is a reaction to aggressive moves by rival Google, which has been pushing hard for businesses to adopt its Apps for Work suite, which includes products like Gmail and Google Docs. Last year the search giant reached out to Microsoft’s Office customers directly, saying it will give them free access to Apps for Work for the remainder of their contract term, on condition they pay for a one year Apps for Work subscription after.

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