Microsoft Licensing

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The following is an excerpt from the Directions on Microsoft Office 365 Evaluation Guide.

Office 365 will include the next versions of the following Microsoft-hosted services (Sidebar):

• Exchange Online Standard, powered by Exchange Server 2010
• SharePoint Online Standard, powered by SharePoint Server 2010
• Lync Online Standard (formerly Communications Online Standard), powered by Lync Server 2010.

Office 365 will introduce many new service plans that bundle various levels of the three services, substantially expanding the set of options over the previous version, referred to as the Business Productivity Online Suite (BPOS). Two plans will include per-user, per-month subscription licenses for the Office 2010 Professional Plus desktop software. Organizations can already buy subscription licenses for Office in several volume licensing plans, so the Office 365 offer is not radically new. However, it could benefit organizations that want to put a single, predictable per-user, per-month price on their most important desktop applications and communications services for business users.

With Office 365, Microsoft has also firmed up plans to improve the technology of its multitenant version, bringing its capabilities closer to those of the dedicated version and the on-premises products. Microsoft has also changed the licensing requirements for the dedicated version. To qualify for a dedicated version of Office 365, an organization must license at least 30,000 users (up from 5,000 with BPOS previously).

Office 365 also enables users to connect to the service using their existing Active Directory credentials (single sign-on) without requiring additional software on the client system, as BPOS did previously, and without requiring connectivity to the corporate network, using Active Directory Federation Services (ADFS) 2.0. ADFS is a claims-based system that issues security tokens (claims) when requested by a consuming application, such as Office 365. Federation server proxies (Internet-facing servers that connect to Active Directory) issue tokens rather than passing full security credentials.

ADFS 2.0, when used in tandem with Office 365, enables users to connect to services such as SharePoint Online using their existing credentials and enables secure extranet collaboration with users outside the corporate firewall.