Office 365 for Professionals and Small Business

Office 365 for professionals and small business, sometimes designated Office 365 Plan P1, is designed to appeal to small businesses in terms of features and price without cannibalizing Microsoft’s more expensive offerings for larger customers. As the naming implies, additional small business offerings—for example, a level P2 and a P3—might be offered in the future.

Office 365 level P1 contains many of the capabilities in Office 365 level E2, a subscription aimed at larger enterprises, but is priced at US$6 per user per month rather than US$16 per user per month and caps at 50 the number of user mailboxes, the number of simultaneous participants in an online meeting, and the number of unique external users that can access the customer’s SharePoint Online site content in a given month. Compared to the enterprise offerings, P1 also does not include the ability to expand SharePoint storage space beyond the standard allotment, Active Directory synchronization (which allows administrators to automate Office 365 account provisioning and enables users to use a single set of credentials to authenticate against both their organization’s local Active Directory and Office 365), retention policies (which dictate how long messages are retained and what the system does when messages reach their retention age), litigation hold (which prevents messages within specified mailboxes from being permanently deleted), and telephone-based technical support. It is not an option to add any of these items for an additional fee.