At the official Office Blogs, Microsoft announced coming changes to its Office 365 lineup for small and medium businesses, which include new features, lower prices and increased plan flexibility.
Microsoft will be releasing on October 1 three new Office 365 plans that were developed with SMB usage in mind, which are companies that have up to a maximum of only 250 employees.
The three new plans are Office 365 Business, Office 365 Business Essentials and Office 365 Business Premium.
In Office 365 Business, companies will receive full access to Microsoft Office applications, which include Word, Outlook, Excel, Powerpoint, Publisher and OneNote. The company also gets 1TB of Business shared cloud storage, through which employees will be able to access, edit and collaborate on documents from their respective Windows PCs, Windows tablet computers, smartphones, Apple Macs and iPads. Office 365 Business costs $8.25 per user per month.
In Office 365 Business Essentials, companies gain access to core cloud services, which includes company e-mails, shared calendars, Office Online, online meetings, instant messaging, video conference calls, cloud file storage and file sharing. Office 365 Business Essentials costs $5 per user per month.
In Office 365 Premium, however, companies will receive all the items listed under both Office 365 Business and Office 365 Business Essentials. Office 365 Premium costs $12.50 per user per month.
All plans have a seat cap of 300 employees for each plan.
The three new plans will eventually replace Microsoft's current SMB plans, which are Small Business, Small Business Premium and Midsize Business. However, all the company's Enterprise plans will be unchanged.
Microsoft is making the changes in response to the feedback that the company has received from customers in SMBs regarding their wishes for Office 365. The changes reflect the need of companies to have more choices on the product, better value gained from the product and added flexibility on the proposed plans.
Existing SMB customers of Microsoft's Office 365 will also be receiving new benefits. Companies with the Small Business and Small Business Premium plans will enjoy a higher seat cap of 300, a huge increase from the previous seat cap of only 25. Companies with the Midsize Business plan, on the other hand, will see the price per seat reduced from $15 per month to $12.50 per month.
"These changes show that Microsoft, or the Office org, is moving in one direction. They have been moving all these pieces toward a final picture, like the announcement [in April] of OneDrive for Business [with 1TB of free storage per user]. It's all starting to make more sense," said Directions analyst Wes Miller.
Microsoft said that the company will be discussing the proposed changes in more detail at the Worldwide Partner Conference that will be held in Washington D.C., from July 14 to July 17.
