Office 365 and Microsoft 365 – Upcoming branding changes

From next week (21^st April 2020 – that’s a Tuesday for those that have lost which day/month we’re currently on!) Office 365 and Microsoft 365 are being rebranded to fall under one name – Microsoft 365. How will this affect you? Well that depends…

If you’re an Enterprise or Academic customer, i.e. your current Office or Microsoft 365 licences start with an E or A (Microsoft 365 E3, Office A1 etc.) you can stop reading – these aren’t changing (yet!)

If you have business-level licences, keep reading:

Firstly the name changes, to bring everything under the Microsoft 365 banner:

• Office 365 Business Essentials becomes Microsoft 365 Business Basic
• Office 365 Business Premium becomes Microsoft 365 Business Standard
• Microsoft 365 Business becomes Microsoft 365 Business Premium
• Office 365 Business/Office 365 ProPlus become Microsoft 365 Apps

This reflects how integrated all these suites are, and also the add-ons that are available, e.g. Microsoft 365 Business Voice.

What will change?

Mostly, nothing. You’ll eventually see the name change on your invoices, and possible even in the products themselves as they are updated to reflect the name changes. At a technical/feature level though, nothing changes, and there’s nothing for you to do…

Apart from – and this is the good news – customers with Microsoft 365 Business (which gets the “Premium” tag from 21^st April) will gain the full features of Azure AD Premium 1 (https://techcommunity.microsoft.com/t5/small-and-medium-business-blog/azure-active-directory-premium-p1-is-coming-to-microsoft-365/ba-p/1275496).

Up till now, that’s been limited to the three most critical features of P1, namely conditional access, self-service password reset and multi-factor authentication. These will now be joined by cloud app discovery, application proxy, dynamic groups and passwordless authentication – all four of which assist in a remote-working, cloud-based business. As these features are rolled out to existing customers, we’ll be looking to see how they can benefit your business and will contact you to discuss.

One thing the rebranding helps with is promote the ease of which customers can move between the different levels of Microsoft 365 – if you have Microsoft 365 Business Basic, it’s easy to upgrade to Business Premium, and gain all those security features. And of course, with Fuse you can mix and match those licences as needed – and in the current circumstances, perhaps downgrade or remove licences if needed (see our previous blog post)

We’ll be updating our website to reflect these changes over the next few weeks, but for a quick comparison between Microsoft 365 Standard and Premium, download this comparison sheet. If you want to discuss licencing changes, please contact us.