Office 365 Prices Cut

In Mar. 2012, Microsoft reduced the price of most Office 365 subscription offerings targeting midsize and large organizations by between 10% and 20%. The worldwide change affects new and renewing customers; existing customers will be able to take advantage of the changes when they renew their subscriptions. While the price cuts may help Microsoft attract new customers, organizations that already purchased Office 365 through an Enterprise Agreement (EA) won’t, as a matter of policy, benefit from the revised price schedule during the current EA term. They’ll have to wait until their subsequent EA renewals.

Price Cut Varies Across Offerings

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 per-user.