Office 365 Business Essentials – becomes Microsoft 365 Business Basic One of the most popular packages, Office 365 Business Premium includes all the core services – Email, Teams, Sharepoint, OneDrive etc – plus a license for the Microsoft Office suite (Word, Excel, Powerpoint, Outlook) to install on your devices Office 365 Business Premium – becomes Microsoft 365 Business Standard However, we do think it’s worth sharing a bit of detail of the changes being made for clients this may be reflected in future invoices and for anyone looking or considering Microsoft 365 or Office 365 this might help ensure you are picking the right suite or bundle for you. We won’t dwell on the details of each individual package here – this is pretty well understood now and very well documented on Microsoft’s website we would of course welcome you to contact us here at Vital – a Microsoft Cloud Gold Partner – to answer any questions you may have. Here at Vital, we have been promoting the benefits of Microsoft 365 to our clients, partners, prospects and wider network for some time and we are pleased to see that Microsoft are now taking steps to try and address some of this confusion by consolidating all the Office 365 and Microsoft 365 packages under the Microsoft 365 banner.

Of course, this caused and continues to cause much confusion for the consumer who understandably does not understand – and nor do they particularly want to! – the differences between Microsoft 365 and Microsoft Office 365.

Initially designed as a much simpler “super suite” of core services, including Windows 10 licences an additional out-of-the-box functionality and default configuration, Microsoft 365 was designed to help businesses and organisations take advantage of a more integrated, better secured set of cloud services. Fast forward to 2017 and Microsoft launched a new set of “packages” of, fundamentally, these same cloud services under the shortened “Microsoft 365” banner.

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