Office 365 Suites for Enterprises

For Microsoft’s latest collaboration and search technologies, organizations might need to purchase Office 365 suites. Office 365 is licensed on a Per-User subscription basis, and many organizations purchase suites of Microsoft-hosted services and software. Shown here are the three Office 365 suites for knowledge workers in medium and large businesses, and in small organizations with sophisticated needs.

Designated E1, E3, and E4, the suites are packaged in a Russian-doll fashion, with each higher suite’s features being a superset of the lower one. Prices quoted are per user, per month and represent the highest a U.S. business customer would pay, although prices in other global regions may be higher.

E1, the base suite, includes the most common Exchange, SharePoint, and Skype for Business (formerly Lync) functions. It also delivers rights to the Yammer Enterprise social networking service and the Office Online Web-based applications for working with Office documents. E1 is a prerequisite for some new collaboration and search features that cover tasks traditionally performed by SharePoint. They include the Office 365 Groups collaboration feature (similar to SharePoint Team Sites), the Delve search and recommendation application, and the Office 365 Video sharing application. E1 also delivers rights for on-premises Exchange, SharePoint, and Skype for Business software equivalent to the Standard Client Access Licenses (SCALs) of those products, and the Enterprise CAL (ECAL) of Skype for Business. (E1 includes the capabilities of the former E2 plan, which was eliminated in 2013.)