Enterprise Mobility Suite Renamed, Level Added

In Oct. 2016, the Enterprise Mobility Suite—a collection of online services for managing and protecting devices, identities, and data—was renamed Enterprise Mobility + Security, but it retains a Per-User subscription license model and its original acronym (EMS). However, rather than one EMS offering there are now two, designated E3 and E5. EMS E3 is equivalent to the previous offering, and its price remains unchanged, while EMS E5 adds new protection capabilities but at much higher cost. Furthermore, E5 could be an all-or-nothing proposition, as covering just a subset of users could be problematic for license compliance and other technical reasons.

First introduced in Apr. 2014, the Enterprise Mobility Suite included User Subscription Licenses (User SLs) for several online services as well as use rights for multiple on-premises server products. At launch, EMS was offered stand-alone only, but it was later included as part of the Enterprise Cloud Suite (ECS), which bundled EMS with Office 365 Enterprise E3 and Windows Enterprise User SLs.