Wednesday, October 1, 2014

Office365 New Plans announced

 

In a move to achieve simplification of plans , Microsoft has announced 3 new plans effective 1st October 2014. These plans are for the SMB Customers . SMB means Small & Mid Business Customers. They replace the 2 plans for Small Business and 1 plan for Mid Business which were in existence . There is no change in the Enterprise Plans though. Have a look at the chart which compares the new plans :

http://www.techgyan.com/Pages/Office365PlansComparison.aspx

Some important points to be noted are:

1) The 3 new plans scale up to the maximum of 300 users. The 2 old plans for Small Business were able to scale upto 25 users only.

2) The Support is 24x 7 phone support. The previous Small Business Customers had only forum based support.

3) You can mix and match between SMB and Enterprise plans . This is a huge benefit. Earlier plans were in Silos meaning that you could not do a mix and match between Small Business and Mid market and Enterprise plans.

4) The older plan which offered only Office Pro Plus @ 720 per month . The new plan is called Business and it gives you Office Std for local installable copy of MS Office plus Office Online which is Office on a browser plus Office for Tablet plus Office for Smart phone plus One Drive for Business with 1 Terabyte Cloud Storage. Note that if you need MS Access, you ned to look at E3 or Pro Plus plan.

5) The existing Small Business Customers will see their cap of users increase to 300. And the existing Mid Business Customers will see their mailbox cost reduce from Rs. 900 to Rs. 750, the next time they renew subscription.

6) Active Directory integration available for all plans.

7) For existing Small Business and Small Business Premium and Mid Business Plan Customers , the action plan is 2 fold. Till 1st October 2015 , they should remain with their current plan. After 1st October 2015, they should upgrade to Business Essentials or Business Premium plan.

with warm regards

Suresh Ramani

www.TechGyan.com

Blog: www.CloudChangesEverything.com

Microsoft MVP 2009
Microsoft Worldwide Partner of the Year 2011 & 2007