What are the Office 365 plans? Plans are predefined mixes of products and features of Office 365 that you can use in your organization based on your needs.
This mix of products will consist of a combination of Exchange, SharePoint, Skype for Business, and other workloads and features, for example:
- Office 365 ProPlus or Essentials: Desktop productivity suite
- Exchange Online: Enterprise-class email solution
- SharePoint Online: Collaboration, repository, and file sharing
- Skype for Business: Online communication, including video and voice calls
These productivity tools have their own features and, combined with other products, they will have the integration that the end users need. Organizations need to keep their software and solutions updated to be competitive in the market, and they need to evaluate their IT costs based on what is needed and when. But with Office 365, these features are updated on a weekly or monthly basis to help organizations stay up to date without requiring big upgrade projects, such as those that are needed for on-premises systems.
While this book is based on a technology that is constantly changing, the core products and plans have not changed much since the beginning of Office 365. The Office 365 plans differ with respect to the Enterprise and Business plans according to the size and type of your organization.
At the time of writing this chapter, the plans are divided into six different groups:
- Home
- Small business
- Education
- Nonprofit
- Enterprise
- Firstline Workers
There are also individual services, such as the following:
- Business-class email, for information refer to https://products.office.com/en/exchange/exchange-online)
- File storage and sharing, for information refer to https://products.office.com/en/onedrive-for-business/online-cloud-storage)
- Online meetings, for information refer to https://products.office.com/en/skype-for-business/online-meetings)