Source: Microsoft Blog
Microsoft recently announced changes to pricing for Microsoft 365 – the first substantive pricing update since launching Office 365 a decade ago.
What’s New?
Since introducing Microsoft 365 (formerly known as Office 365), Microsoft has added 24 apps1 to the suites—Microsoft Teams, Power Apps, Power BI, Power Automate, Stream, Planner, Visio, OneDrive, Yammer, and Whiteboard—and has released over 1,400 new features and capabilities in three key areas.
1. Communication and collaboration. Microsoft Teams is the new front end across work, life, and learning for more than 250 million monthly active users. In 2020 alone Microsoft released over 300 new capabilities including Together mode, background effects, large gallery view, raise hand, live reactions, breakout rooms, live captions with speaker attribution, and Fluid components, just to name a few.
Microsoft introduced a new category of collaborative applications in Teams, empowering people and organizations for hybrid work through deep integrations with Power Platform, Whiteboard, Lists, Planner, Shifts, Forms, and SharePoint.
Microsoft also introduced real-time collaboration in Word, Excel, and PowerPoint desktop apps while a growing set of capabilities like @mentions, assign tasks, modern comments, and auto-save have streamlined the collaboration experience. Microsoft added and expanded OneDrive cloud storage and the Exchange Online mailboxes.
2. Security and compliance. Since Microsoft first introduced Microsoft 365, they have added new attack surface reduction capabilities to help organizations defend against ransomware and other threats. Microsoft has added capabilities like data loss prevention (DLP) for email and documents, sensitivity labels, and message encryption to help keep important data within the organization.
3. AI and automation. Over the past decade, Microsoft has infused AI capabilities across productivity and collaboration applications to help everyone achieve more. Across Microsoft 365, Microsoft has introduced AI-powered innovations to help users be better writers, designers, and presenters. Cloud-powered AI now automatically creates maps, charts, and tables in Excel, and sorts email and removes clutter in Outlook. And AI-powered real-time translation, captions, and transcription make collaboration and communication more accessible and engaging for everyone.
Extending Audio Conference Capabililites
Along with the price increase announcement, Microsoft revealed unlimited dial-in capabilities for Microsoft Teams meetings across enterprise, business, frontline, and government suites over the next few months. Currently included with Microsoft 365 E5 and Office 365 E5, Microsoft has come to see dial-in as an important part of the complete Teams experience. Unlimited dial-in provides peace of mind that users will be able to join their Microsoft Teams meeting from virtually any device regardless of location.
New Pricing
The pricing changes will go into effect in six months. On March 1, 2022, Microsoft will update list pricing for the following commercial products:
Microsoft 365 Business Basic (from $5 to $6 user/month)
Microsoft 365 Business Premium (from $20 to $22 user/month)
Office 365 E1 (from $8 to $10 user/month)
Office 365 E3 (from $20 to $23 user/month)
Office 365 E5 (from $35 to $38 user/month)
Microsoft 365 E3 (from $32 to $36 user/month)
These increases will apply globally with local market adjustments for certain regions. There are no changes to pricing for education and consumer products at this time.
For more information on Microsoft 365, please contact the consulting team at TrinSoft.
1At launch in June 2011, Office 365 included Word, Excel, PowerPoint, Outlook, Lync, Exchange, and InfoPath. Microsoft has since expanded to add other apps – in whole or in part – and entirely new capabilities including: Access, Bookings, Delve, Forms, GroupMe, Kaizala, Lens, Lists, OneDrive, OneNote Class Notebook, Planner, Power Apps, Power Automate, Power BI, Publisher, SharePoint, Staff Hub, Stream, Sway, Teams, To-Do, Visio, Whiteboard, and Yammer.
