It’s important to take a close look at your subscriptions and keep on top of your Microsoft 365 license administration. You can renew your Microsoft subscription early, before the end of February, and maintain your current price until February 2023. If you are still stuck, please get in touch as we are a Microsoft partner and will be happy to advise which is the best package for your business. If you would like to see all of the options, this excellent chart lists all Microsoft 365 and Office 365 plans, including what is included under each plan. The key is choosing the right package for your needs. Naming aside, you have a variety of plans to choose from such as E(Enterprise) and F(Frontline Workers) and each of these has different levels (E1, E3 and E5 or F1 and F3). Most of the plans are now under Microsoft 365, except for a few exceptions such as the Enterprise plans. However, on April 2020, Microsoft rebranded Office 365 to Microsoft 365.
Office 365 being the basic applications (Word, Excel, Outlook etc.) and Microsoft 365 being the basic applications plus a Windows license, mobility, and security tools. Up to April 2020, the difference was fairly clear, with two categories: Office 365 and Microsoft 365. If anyone can make something fairly straightforward sound immensely complicated, then Microsoft are the masters! So much so that every other Google search result for “Microsoft 365” relates to people trying to explain the differences between the versions, rather than on the products themselves. Their information doesn’t help due to the confusing number of versions, all with different products and features. Let’s get straight to the point though – Microsoft licensing can be highly complicated. The subscription model is certainly fairer than before as organisations can scale their licenses up and down as needed.
Many organisations struggle to understand their subscriptions and as a result, end up oversubscribing and buying software they don’t need. Understanding licensing – Are you paying too much? There are no changes to pricing for education products at this time. This includes rises for key services such as Microsoft 365 and Office 365. The price rise means any customer with Microsoft subscriptions that renew after 1st March 2022 will automatically be moved onto the higher prices. Consumer and education subscriptions won't be affected either.At the end of last year, Microsoft announced they are due to increase prices for Microsoft 365 as of 1st March 2022.Īs this price rise is due to take effect in less than two months, now is the time to act. The company won't be adjusting the cost of certain Office subscriptions, including Microsoft 365 E5 ($57 per user per month), Microsoft 365 F1 ($2.25) and Microsoft 365 F3 ($8), a spokesperson told CNBC in an email.
Office 365 E5 includes features such as cloud-based phones, a Pro version of the Power BI data-visualization software and Teams data-loss prevention. The E5 tier represents 8% of the Office 365 installed base among commercial customers, chief financial officer Amy Hood told analysts in July. The company is making progress there, too, even leaving aside the coming price increases. Increasing the amount of money coming from each Office subscriber is the other way Microsoft expands its Office cloud business. That has helped widen the base of Office users, and now there are over 300 million commercial Office 365 paid seats, Spataro wrote.
The bundle has expanded to include the Teams communication app, the Whiteboard collaboration app and Power Platform application-development tools for non-developers, among other assets, Spataro wrote.
This marks "the first substantive pricing update since we launched Office 365 a decade ago," Microsoft 365 corporate vice president Jared Spataro wrote in a blog post.