New Office 365 for Business Subscription Plans Now Available
As noted in the blog post, titled “Announcing availability of new Office 365 plans for small and midsized businesses,” at the “Office Blogs” site, Microsoft released three new Office 365 for business subscription plans for small to medium sized businesses on October 1st, 2014. These new Office 365 for business subscription plans, named “Office 365 Business Essentials,” “Office 365 Business,” and “Office 365 Business Premium,” replace the three previous Office 365 for business plans that were named “Small Business,” “Small Business Premium,” and “Midsize Business.” Existing Office 365 for business subscribers will have until October 1st, 2015 to decide to which of the new subscription plans they would like to migrate. Note that there will be no changes to the Office 365 for Enterprise plans.
The new Office 365 for business subscription plans offer the core cloud computing tools requested by small to medium sized businesses. Each plan covers up to 300 users at most. The basic Office 365 for business subscription plan, named “Office 365 Business Essentials,” offers the “Business-class” email service, Office Online, cloud storage with OneDrive, online meeting, and social networking tools.
The new Office 365 for business subscription plan named “Office 365 Business” offers the file storage and access to Office Online found in the previous package, but also includes full, installable versions of Office for PCs and Macs, as well as versions of Office for smartphones and tablets. The installable Office applications included with this plan are Microsoft Excel, Outlook, OneNote, PowerPoint, Publisher, and Word.
The new Office 365 for business subscription plan named “Office 365 Business Premium” offers all the features of both the “Office 365 Business Essentials” and the “Office 365 Business” plans. You can compare the plans and review plan pricing by visiting the Office.com site.
