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James Haywood
- Understanding the Microsoft 365 Licensing Structure…and What to Choose!
Knowledge Base
Understanding the Microsoft 365 Licensing Structure…and What to Choose!
Microsoft 365 (formerly Office 365) has evolved from an office-suite rental service to a full-blown small business and enterprise productivity suite. As a result, many organizations have replaced their entire infrastructure (servers/applications) with Microsoft 365. At this point, the 365 offerings have become so vast and robust that it has become challenging to figure out which plan is best for any organization.
This article provides a starting point for understanding the 365-licensing structure and determining which direction makes the most sense to your organization.
Key Highlights Between Plans
Small / Medium Business Track
Business Basic: $6.00 u/m
Business Standard: $12.50 u/m
Business Premium: $22.00 u/m
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These three licenses are for small and medium-sized businesses (300 or fewer employees). Microsoft caps each license at 300 users, so at most, you can only have 300 of one of these licenses.
These three plans offer cloud storage (OneDrive/SharePoint), project collaboration through Teams, email and calendaring through Exchange, basic Identity management through Azure Active Directory, and online versions of the Office applications.
The main differences:
- Business Basic and Business Standard have the same offerings minus the downloaded Office Applications (Word / Excel / PP / Publisher / Access). A user with Business Basic can still access Word / PP / Excel through the online versions, which have most of the features as the downloaded versions. If Access and Publisher are needed, Business Standard is required.
- Business Premium includes the above features of Business Standard + Security features and device management features.
Enterprise Tracks; Information Workers / Frontline Workers
Information Worker and Frontline Worker plans within the Enterprise 365 tracks offer Office Suite products and OneDrive storage. Both plans, however, are vastly different. The Information Worker plan is geared toward heavy PC / Laptop / Device users.
Information Workers depend on the productivity suite offerings. Frontline Worker plans, however, are designed for users who may need basic access to productivity and communication suites, but their work roles are not dependent on this.
Enterprise Track; Information Workers
Microsoft 365
E3 license: $36.00 u/m
E5 license: $57.00 u/m
Office 365
E1 license: $10 u/m
E3 license: $23 u/m
E5 license: $38 u/m
NOTE: Microsoft 365 and Office 365 are used synonymously as these used to refer to the same thing. However, these classifications of productivity suites are different. For example, Office 365 focuses more on productivity and office applications, whereas Microsoft 365 focuses on identity, security, and compliance. In addition, Microsoft 365 is typically more expensive than Office 365 as it includes significantly more.
Enterprise Track; Frontline Workers
Microsoft 365
F1 license: $2.25 u/m
F3 license: $8.00 u/m
Office 365
F3 license: $4.00 u/m
As stated above, Microsoft 365 and Office 365 are different. These plans have some Office product suite offerings and cloud storage offerings. All three plans are geared towards heavy Teams usage.
Key differences:
- M365 F1 licenses do NOT have email, whereas both F3 products have basic email plans.
- M365 F1 licenses have read-only access to Office products, whereas M365 F3 and O365 F3 have varied Office product access.
This guide is just the tip of the iceberg and can be confusing. Some add-on licenses include the phone system, data loss prevention, cloud + device security, specific compliance features, and so on.
As always, if you have any questions, please reach out to James Haywood, Senior Project Coordinator with Intrada Technologies. Intrada is a Microsoft Partner who can review and compare each plan in more detail to see which is right for your business.
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