When looking into Microsoft 365 plans it can become a little confusing telling the differences between them, and even harder to understand how your decision will affect your London based business down the road.
In this blog article, we’ll be comparing Business plans against Enterprise plans
First of all it’s important to note that an Microsoft 365 account cannot mix “Business” class plans and “Enterprise” (E) class plans in the same account. You can mix license types within the class of an account; for example you can mix E1 plans and E3 plans in the same account, but you can’t mix E3 and Small Business plans in the same account. This fact makes choosing the class of plan for your business critical to your Microsoft 365 migration.
The Business plans
The three Business plans basically combine the 3 features below:
- Hosted Exchange (email platform)
- Team sites (online file server)
- Microsoft Office (Word, Excel, Outlook, Access, etc.)
The “Business Essentials” plan includes #1 and #2 only. The “Business” plan includes #2 and #3. Finally the “Business Premium” plan includes all three. For more details on each of these plans, please see below.
Microsoft 365 Business Essentials
The Business Essentials plan costs £3.80 per user, per month. This plan includes:
- Email with 50GB mailbox
- 1 TB file storage and sharing
- HD video conferencing
- Office Online
Microsoft 365 Business
Next up is the very plainly named “Microsoft 365 Business” plan. This plan really inverts most of the features of the Business Essentials plan. It focuses on businesses which want to get Microsoft Office, but don’t want the email, social, SharePoint, and Lync features. This plan costs £7.90 per user, per month and includes:
- 1 TB file storage and sharing
- Full, installed Office on PC/Mac
- Office apps on tablets and phones
Microsoft 365 Business Premium
Lastly for £9.40 per user, per month the Business Premium plan combines the features of both plans above, offering the email features and the Microsoft Office licenses.
- Email with 50 GB mailbox
- 1 TB file storage and sharing
- HD video conferencing
- Full, installed Office on PC/Mac
- Office apps on tablets and phones
The Enterprise Plans
There are four Microsoft 365 enterprise plans, E1 – E4. The most popular of these are the E1 and E3 plans, which mix well together. E1 plans are £5.00 per user, per month and E3 plans are £14.70 per user, per month. The biggest difference between the two is the inclusion of 5 Office licenses with E3 plans, though E3 also includes some more advanced email features.
The E1 plan resembles an Enterprise version of the Business Essentials plan – focusing on the online features and not coming with Microsoft Office licenses. The E3 plan mirrors the Microsoft 365 Business Premium plan in the “Business” class plans. In between E1 and E3 is the “Microsoft 365 Pro Plus” plan which provides Microsoft Office licenses plus a few enterprise management tools, so it can be compared most closely to the “Microsoft 365 Business” plan above.
Enterprise plans include some capabilities that aren’t included in the regular Business class plans. These are:
this is basically a way for administrators to track obsolete/outdated version of Microsoft Office that users may be working with
adds the ability to do legal holds on mailboxes, and enforce data loss prevention, add eDiscovery center to SharePoint for legal discovery activities
implementation of group policy that focuses on configuring Microsoft Office on users computers
If you have any comments or questions regarding Microsoft 365, please contact totality services.
IT Support London