What You Need to Know About Microsoft Office 365 Price Increase

Welcome 2022! As with every new year, we endeavor to persevere with hope, optimism, and clarity. We will leave the hope and optimism for another discussion, let’s focus on clarity.

When I started this blog, I thought I had a pretty good understanding of Microsoft’s offerings. After all, we are a Microsoft Gold partner and believe in their solutions. One of the many challenges for customers and partners of Microsoft is keeping up with the changes.

Back in August, Mr. Jared Spataro, Microsoft Corporate Vice President for Microsoft 365 announced price changes to certain plans effective March 1^st, 2022.

The plans, name changes and price increases are as follows:

Microsoft 365 Business Basic (from $5 to $6 per user) 20% increase - formerly Office 365 Business Essentials

Microsoft 365 Business Premium (from $20 to $22) 10% increase – formerly Microsoft 365 Business

Office 365 E1 (from $8 to $10) 25%

Office 365 E3 (from $20 to $23) 15%

Office 365 E5 (from $35 to $38) 8.57%

Microsoft 365 E3 (from $32 to $36)

Another major announcement in early 2021 that caused some confusion was the renaming of Office 365 Business plans to Microsoft 365.

Why did Microsoft change the name? According to Microsoft, they “changed the name to be more reflective of the range of features and benefits in the subscription, to meet the unique needs of individuals and businesses.” Must say that’s a very bloggy, marketing response.

Microsoft has a variety of productivity and security management offerings that small to medium-sized customers may consider, each bringing increasingly powerful features and functionality.

Which begs the next question, what are the additional features and benefits of Microsoft 365?

The four plans we recommend for small to medium businesses (under 300 devices):

• Microsoft 365 Business Basic
• Microsoft 365 Business Standard
• Microsoft Business Premium
• Microsoft 365 Apps for Business

all contain subsets of the Office 365 applications we use daily including Outlook, Word, Excel, PowerPoint, Publisher and Access as well as subset of “Secure Cloud Services”. The Secure Cloud Services include a combination of Teams for collaboration (highly recommended), Exchange (email), OneDrive and SharePoint. The plan we recommend most to our customers, Microsoft Business Premium, also includes Intune and Azure Information Protection.

The two apps, Intune and Azure Information Protection are key components of Microsoft’s cloud Enterprise Mobility and Security services. Microsoft Intune is a Cloud-based enterprise mobility management service that helps manage the mobile devices and applications that your employees are using to access your corporate data. With Intune, you can make sure that any devices and apps that your employees are using are compliant with your company’s security requirements. As for Azure Information Protection, they key here is that it “is a cloud-based solution that enables organizations to discover, classify, and protect documents and emails by applying labels to content” meaning it will control and help secure email, documents, and sensitive data that you share outside your company.

For a more in depth review, I highly recommend visiting Microsoft's Business Plan Comparison page.

The past two years certainly brought a tremendous amount of change to all aspects of our lives. As we continue to adjust to these changes and move forward in the new environment, we will endeavor to provide clarity and recommendations for the Microsoft 365 Business plan that is right for your organization.

Stay tuned for more as we attempt to clarify additional changes to Microsoft’s suite of products in future blogs…in the meantime, please visit our website Modo Networks and
give us a call at 214-299-8040 to learn more.