More Than a Dozen Office 365 Plans Available

[September 15, 2014 note: A more recent version of this report, updated to reflect licensing changes, can be found at www.directionsonmicrosoft.com/research/secured/2014/09/office-365-evaluation-guide-office-365-plans-large-businesses.]

First offered in June, 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 for licensing individual services or bundles of several services, with a few plans including rights to use Office Professional Plus desktop software. While Office 365 is packaged to address requirements of a broad spectrum of user types, organizational sizes, and transition scenarios, customers will have to sort through an array of options to determine the best fit.

(For commercial enterprises with 30,000 users or more as well as large government organizations, Microsoft also offers Office 365 dedicated services hosted on server hardware dedicated to a specific customer. This article focuses on the far more common multitenant offerings.)