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Microsoft Announces New Subscription Pricing for M365

Tim Meuter serves as the IT Director at TRUE. With decades of experience designing, configuring, and delivering IT Managed Services to TRUE clients, his is one of our preeminent subject matter experts when it comes to architecting your environment. He helps clients evaluate the solutions they are using and increase efficiencies for better return on investment (ROI). With Microsoft’s tendency to completely reconfigure their licensing and nomenclature at the drop of a hat, he has helped a number of organizations who were previously missing out on benefits available to them from Microsoft – especially when it comes to security features – either due to poor alignment of their needs and license structures, or a simple lack of awareness of everything available to them. As with all of our subject matter experts at TRUE, Tim thrives on helping clients become more efficient and more secure.

M365 Price Increase

On August 19, 2021 Microsoft announced they will be increasing the pricing of the subscription for many of the Online Subscriptions. According to Jared Spataro, Corporate Vice President for Microsoft 365, this is the first time Microsoft has increased its prices since 2011.

If you are purchasing directly from Microsoft, or if you purchase from your IT company via the Cloud Solution Provider (CSP) program this cost increase will affect you. It may not seem like much $1.00 here $2.00 there, but when you start to add it up over time and across your user base it could significantly add to your monthly costs.

Now is the time to evaluate what features you are using in the Microsoft product suites and determine if you are on the right type of subscription for your company.

For example, in the pricing below currently Office 365 E3 and Microsoft 365 Business Premium are the same cost. If you are a company that has under 300 users and your users’ mailboxes are under 50 GB in size you should really look into switching from an office 365 E3 subscription model and move over to the Microsoft 365 Business Premium Subscription. After March 1 it will save you $1.00 per license to do this move.

If your users have larger mailboxes you may want to consider just having the Office 365 E3 license to those users and put the rest of your users on the Microsoft 365 Business Premium subscription.

New Pricing

Here are the new Prices as stated by Microsoft.

Product Name New Cost Per User Old Cost Per User
Microsoft 365 Business Basic $6 $5
Microsoft 365 Business Premium $22 $20
Microsoft 365 E3 $36 $32
Office 365 E1 $10 $8
Office 365 E3 $23 $20
Office 365 E5 $38 $35

Unlimited Audio Conferencing

They also announced unlimited dial-in capabilities for Teams meetings across enterprise, business, frontline and government suites “over the next few months” in recognition of the growing need for cloud connectivity even in areas with “bad internet connection.” Dial-in is already included with M365 E5 and O365 E5.

Currently this add on feature is available as part of a promo for “free” for 1 year. After 1 year it would cost $4.00 a month. Now they will be including it into the subscriptions.

In March it seems the new Unlimited Dial-In plan will be available for most of the subscriptions.

Benefits of Working With TRUE for Your Microsoft Licensing

Whether you buy through TRUE or direct from Microsoft, your cost is going to be the same, so you can’t really lose there.

I Have My Own IT Team, so How Can TRUE Help?

If you have a complete internal IT team, we can help you get the most ROI. identify which license is going to give you the most features for your cost. Even in midmarket and enterprise level companies, it is not uncommon for us to see people who don’t realize that they would actually get more security features and value out of a Business Premium subscription than an Enterprise subscription.

I Use TRUE for IT Services, But Shouldn’t I Buy Direct from Microsoft?

When you utilize our CSP program, purchasing your licensing and you are already using our Managed IT Services, this enables you to consolidate bills. We can pay Microsoft on your behalf, and can send you a single bill for your Accounting Department to deal with, and it’s our experience that Accounting teams are generally pretty happy to increase their efficiency. So, you get the benefit of both increased ROI and simplification of business processes.

Request a consultation with one of our experts to see how TRUE can help.

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