Choosing Microsoft Office 365

There are lots of confusing options when it comes to buying Microsoft Office 365. There are versions for home users, Small businesses, Education, Government, Corporate and Enterprise as well as Non profit.

Getting the wrong one can cost a lot more than is necessary. Let us help you through the maze by showing you the main differences in features and prices.

The first thing to understand is that instead of buying a product in a box that works forever, Microsoft Office 365 is a monthly or yearly subscription.

Secondly, the version you buy has more or less features depending on your requirements. For instance, a small business user won’t need the tools that a government or enterprise needs. A business used may not need email if it’s already provided by the organisation. A home user will not need a document management or video conferencing system.

The third thing to understand is that some versions don’t include a program you install on your laptop, tablet or PC. Instead they work by connecting to a web page where the file that has automatically been saved is displayed. That’s great if you have access to the internet, but no good if you don’t. We’d recommend that for this reason it’s best to only consider versions where you can work both with, and without an internet connection.

What does each version do ?

The table below shows the different features of Microsoft Office 365. For simplicity we’ve only shown the versions that work whether connected to the internet or not.

	Office 365 Home	Office 365 Personal	Office 365 Business	Office 365 ProPlus	Office 365 Enterprise E3
Cost (outright annual purchase upfront)	79.99 (inc VAT)	59.99 1 year auto renewal (inc VAT)	84.00 excl VAT(7.00 per month plus VAT)	–	–
Cost per month	7.99 Monthly auto renewal	5.99 Monthly auto renewal	8.50 user/per month Monthly auto renewal excl vat	£10.10 user/month (annual commitment) excl vat	£14.70 user/month (annual commitment) excl vat
Purchase options	Subscription (monthly or yearly)	Subscription (monthly or yearly)	Subscription (monthly or yearly)	Subscription (yearly)	Subscription (yearly)
Fully installed Office applications Word, Excel, PowerPoint, OneNote	Also includes: Outlook (PC and Mac) Publisher, Access (PC only)	Also includes: Outlook (PC and Mac) Publisher, Access (PC only)	Also includes: Outlook Publisher, (PC and Mac) but NOT Access (Email not included)	All the features of personal plus Publisher, and Skype for Business (Email not included)	All the features of ProPlus plus Unlimited storage email with archiving and legal hold ,  compliance tools, information protection, and voicemail integration   Unified eDiscovery center Rights management, data loss prevention, and encryption Hosted voicemail support
Installations available Compatible with Windows 7 or later, Office 2016 for Mac requires Mac OS X 10.10. Microsoft account required.	5 PCs or Macs	1 PCs or Mac	5 PCs or Macs	5 PCs or Macs per user	5 PCs or Macs per user
Tablets and phones Get the optimized Office experience on your tablets and phones	5 tablets and 5 phones	1 tablets and 1 phones	5 tablets and 5 phones	5 tablets and 5 phones per user	5 tablets and 5 phones per user
Offline storage Save documents to your PC or Mac	Yes	Yes	Yes	Yes	Yes
OneDrive cloud storage Save documents online and access them from nearly anywhere	1 TB storage each for up to 5 users	1 TB storage for 1 user	1 TB storage for 1 user	1 TB storage for 1 user	1 TB storage for 1 user
Skype Calls to mobile phones and landlines	60 minutes/month for up to 5 users each	60 minutes/month for 1 user	–
Unlimited online meetings, IM, and audio, HD video, and web conferencing.	–	–	–	–	Yes
Always up to date	Yes	Yes	Yes	Yes	Yes
Microsoft support Technical support via chat or phone at no extra charge for active subscribers	Yes	Yes	Yes	Yes	Yes
Intranet site for your teams with customizable security settings	–	–	–	–	Yes
Corporate social network to help employees collaborate across departments and locations	–	–	–	–	Yes
Professional digital storytelling tools to create interactive reports, presentations, and more	–	–	Yes	Yes	Yes
Work management tools to bring together teams, tasks, files, and conversations	–	–	–	Yes	Yes
Corporate video portal for uploading and sharing your corporate videos across the company	–	–	–	–	Yes
Meeting broadcast on the Internet to up to 10,000 people, who can attend in a browser on nearly any device	–	–	–	–	Yes
Enterprise management of apps with Group Policy, Telemetry, Shared Computer Activation	–	–	–	Yes	Yes
Self-service Business Intelligence to discover, analyze, and visualize data in Excel	–	–	–	Yes	Yes
Compliance solutions to support Archiving, Auditing and eDiscovery, mailbox and internal site search and legal hold capabilities depending upon subscription type	–	–	–	–	Yes
Information Protection including Rights Management and Data Loss Prevention for emails	–	–	–	Yes	Yes

What next ?

If you’ve identified the version you need then take a look at getting a trial or buy it now.

 How about the old versions of Microsoft Office ?

The traditional Microsoft Office product is still available either in a packaged CD box, or through one of the corporate subscription schemes BUT they tend to be much more expensive than Office 365. For example Microsoft Office Professional 2016 costs £389 but a comparable product like Microsoft Office 365 Business premium costs £ 7.80 a month.

If you are looking to try out or buy other Microsoft software not listed here, let us know and we’ll sort it out for you.

To see how we’ve helped one of our customers deploy Microsoft Office 365 have a look at this reference.

We’ve also recently helped another partner to save £10,000 in deployment costs for a large scale installation by conducting a best value exercise. We were able to  confirm that they were getting the maximum possible saving when they move to Office 365, and ensured they were getting additional support from Microsoft.