Which Office 365 Plan Is Right For Our Business?

If you’re looking into Office 365 plans for your organization, it can be a bit confusing trying to tell the differences between them and what makes sense for your business.

By working with a trusted partner, like CTI, IT executives with limited time and resources can learn about the details of each Office 365 plan. CTI will recommend the best approach for your implementation, with a comprehensive overview of each plan and advise on which one is best suited for you.

Let’s take a look at the different licensing levels Office 365 offers; this will help us better understand the options available to you. Businesses with 300 users or less should consider Business level plans and companies with more than 300 users should consider Enterprise license plans. Below, we’ve outlined the main features of each level plan and costs for each.

The Business Plans

Office 365 Business plans are offered in three different tiers: Business Essentials, Business and Business Premium.

Business Essentials

The Business Essentials plan costs $5.00 per user, per month on an annual commitment. This plan includes:

• Email with 50GB mailbox per user and users can send attachments up to 150MB in size
• 1 TB of personal cloud storage that can be accessed from anywhere and syncs with their PC/Mac for offline access
• HD video conferencing with the ability to host online meetings with audio and video using one-click screen sharing and HD video conferencing
• Office Suite Online

Business

This plan focuses on businesses that want to get Microsoft Office, but don’t want email, social, SharePoint, and Lync features. This plan costs $8.25 per user, per month on an annual agreement and includes:

• 1 TB of personal cloud storage that can be accessed from anywhere and syncs with their PC/Mac for offline access
• Fully installed Office experience across PCs, Macs, Windows tablets, iPad® and Android™ tablets, and most mobile devices
• Email not included

Business Premium

For $12.50 per user, per month on an annual agreement, the Premium plan combines the features of both plans above, offering the email features and Microsoft Office licenses. Other features include:

• Email with 50GB mailbox per user and users can send attachments up to 150MB in size
• Gives each user 1 TB of personal cloud storage that can be accessed from anywhere and that syncs with their PC/Mac for offline access
• HD video conferencing with the ability to host online meetings with audio and video using one-click screen sharing and HD video conferencing
• Fully installed Office experience across PCs, Macs, Windows tablets, iPad and Android tablets, and most mobile devices

The Enterprise Plans

There are four Office 365 Enterprise plans companies have the option to choose from. Users will need to closely review the options in terms of cost and which features they must have and those they may be able to do without.

Enterprise 1

The entry level version, Enterprise E1 is $8.00 per user, per month on an annual agreement and offers the following:

• 1 TB file storage and sharing
• Business-class email hosting with 50 GB mailbox
• Custom email domain addresses (name@yourcompany.com)
• Microsoft Teams, a chat-based workspace that integrates all the people, content, and tools your team needs to be more engaged and effective
• eDiscovery Search
• Skype for Business enables you to host online and video conferencing meetings with up to 250 people
• Skype Meetings Broadcast enables meetings for up to 10,000 people
• FastTrack – Free development support with purchase of 50+ seats
• 24/7 phone & web support

Enterprise E3

Enterprise E3 is Office 365’s midrange plan for $20.00 per user, per month on an annual agreement, and gives users fully installed versions of Office applications: Excel, Word, PowerPoint, Outlook, Publisher, OneNote as well as Skype for Business, and includes the features below:

• 1 TB file storage and sharing
• Business-class email hosting with unlimited mailbox
• Custom email domain addresses (name@yourcompany.com)
• Microsoft Teams, a chat-based workspace that integrates all the people, content, and tools your team needs to be more engaged and effective
• One license covers 5 phones, 5 tablets & 5 PCs or Macs
• eDiscovery (In-place Search, Hold and Export)
• Restrict forwarding emails and access to documents with Azure Rights Management
• Skype for Business enables you to host online and video conferencing meetings with up to 250 people
• Skype Meetings Broadcast enables meetings for up to 10,000 people
• FastTrack – Free development support with purchase of 50+ seats
• 24/7 phone & web support

Enterprise E5

Users looking for the top-of-the-line Office 365 plan can indeed go with Enterprise E5, which includes literally every piece of functionality Office 365 has to offer – including the only plan to offer analytics tools. Other features include:

• 1 TB file storage and sharing
• Business-class email hosting with unlimited mailbox
• Custom email domain addresses (name@yourcompany.com)
• Microsoft Teams, a chat-based workspace that integrates all the people, content, and tools your team needs to be more engaged and effective
• One license covers 5 phones, 5 tablets & 5 PCs or Macs
• Advanced eDiscovery (In-place Search, Hold and Export)
• Restrict forwarding emails and access to documents with Azure Rights Management
• Guard your mailbox against malicious links & attachments with Exchange Online Advanced Threat Protection
• Assess risk and gain insight into potential threats with Advanced Security Management
• Control how support accesses your mailbox with Customer Lockbox
• Advanced Power BI and Delve Analytics
• Skype for Business enables you to host online and video conferencing meetings with up to 250 people
• Skype Meetings Broadcast enables meetings for up to 10,000 people
• Create meetings with dial-in number for attendees to join by telephone or click on the link with PSTN conferencing
• Cloud-based call management with option to add PSTN calling
• 24/7 phone & web support

ProPlus

The ProPlus version of Office 365 requires a monthly fee of $12 per user, per month, which makes it a suitable compromise between the E1 and E3 plans in terms of price. The main distinction here is that ProPlus has enterprise features but no email. ProPlus offers users the most current versions of Office, no matter which device you’re using—PC/Mac, tablet, or phone. In addition, users get:

• 1 TB file storage and sharing
• (Business-class email hosting not included)
• One license covers 5 phones, 5 tablets & 5 PCs or Macs per user
• FastTrack – Free development support with purchase of 50+ seats
• 24/7 phone & web support

What are the Plan Differences?

Enterprise plans include some additional features that aren’t included in the regular Business class plans. Among them are:

• Telemetry – The ability for administrators to track obsolete/outdated versions of Microsoft Office that users may be using.
• Legal tools – Including the ability to do legal holds on mailboxes and enforce data loss prevention, add eDiscovery center to SharePoint for legal discovery, which allows users to perform discovery searches for relevant content within mailboxes.
• Exchange Online Archiving (EOA) cloud-based, advanced archiving capabilities.
• Rights management, data loss prevention and encryption.
• Ability to add-on PSTN service allowing users to search for, acquire, and assign phone numbers to users in your organization, make and receive calls from people inside and outside of the organization directly from Office 365.
• 24/7 Support. The Enterprise plans cover all issues; however, the Business plans only cover critical issues.

One important note – Office 365 accounts cannot be combined with “Business” class plans and “Enterprise” class plans for the same account. You can, however, 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 Office 365 migration.

Conclusion

The team at CTI has been at the forefront of managed IT services for more than 12 years and has partnered with more than 1,600 clients. We provide full installation of Microsoft Office 365 plans, offer complete technology maintenance, as well as provide reliable 24/7 support services to your computer systems, networks, servers, workstations, phone systems, and more. Give us a call at 847-888-1900 to see how we can help.