Buying Office 365 in the Online Subscription Program

Office 365, a new subscription-based offering for information workers, uses online services hosted in Microsoft data centers to provide Exchange, SharePoint, and Lync capabilities to clients running Office. Sold as a per-user license, Office 365 is available through three different licensing programs, but for certain organizations the only way to purchase it is through the Microsoft Online Subscription Program (MOSP) Web site. It will be important for such customers to understand MOSP, including what Office 365 plans are available, pricing, billing options, how to change plans midstream, reducing and increasing subscriptions, how automatic renewals work, and cancellations of subscriptions.

Licensing Overview

Office 365 is a set of online services hosted in Microsoft data centers on multitenant (i.e., shared) servers running 2010 versions of Exchange, Lync, and SharePoint Server. For business customers, Microsoft offers more than a dozen Office 365 per-user subscription plans—some bundles and others a single specific service—with a few that include rights to use Office Professional Plus 2010 desktop software. All Office 365 suites and stand-alone offerings are licensed under the same User Subscription License (USL) model, which offers subscription-based access to software and hosted services along with support services. (See “More Than a Dozen Office 365 Subscription Plans Available“.)