Office 365


Office 365 is a line of subscription services offered by Microsoft as part of the Microsoft Office product line. The brand encompasses plans that allow use of the Microsoft Office software suite over the life of the subscription, as well as cloud-based software as a service products for business environments, such as hosted Exchange Server, Skype for Business Server, and SharePoint, among others. All Office 365 plans include automatic updates to their respective software at no additional charge, as opposed to conventional licenses for these programs—where new versions require purchase of a new license.
After a beta test that began in October 2010, Microsoft launched Office 365 on June 28, 2011, originally aimed at corporate users, as a successor to . With the release of Microsoft Office 2013, Microsoft expanded Office 365 to include new plans aimed at different types of businesses, along with new plans aimed at general consumers, including benefits tailored towards Microsoft consumer services such as OneDrive.
On April 21, 2020, the consumer and small business plans of Office 365 were renamed Microsoft 365, which emphasizes productivity features and services outside of the core Microsoft Office software suite. The Office 365 brand remains in use for plans catered towards enterprise markets.
In the fourth quarter of fiscal year 2017, Office 365 revenue overtook that of conventional license sales of Microsoft Office software for the first time.

History

Microsoft first announced Office 365 in October 2010, beginning with a private beta with various organizations, leading into a public beta in April 2011, and reaching general availability on June 28, 2011. Facing growing competition from Google's similar service Google Apps, Microsoft designed the Office 365 platform to "bring together" its existing online services into "an always-up-to-date cloud service" incorporating Exchange Server, SharePoint, and Lync . Plans were initially launched for small business and enterprises; the small business plan offered Exchange e-mail, SharePoint Online, Lync Online, web hosting via SharePoint, and the Office Web Apps, with the enterprise plan also adding per-user licenses for the Office 2010 Professional Plus software and 24/7 phone support. Following the official launch of the service, Business Productivity Online Suite customers were given 12 months to migrate from BPOS to the Office 365 platform.
With the release of Office 2013, an updated version of the Office 365 platform was launched on February 27, 2013. The server components were updated to their respective 2013 versions, and Microsoft expanded the Office 365 service with new plans, such as Small Business Premium, Midsize Premium, and Pro Plus. A new Office 365 Home Premium plan aimed at home users offers access to the Office 2013 suite for up to five computers, along with expanded OneDrive storage and 60 minutes of Skype calls monthly. The plan is aimed at mainstream consumers, especially those who want to install Office on multiple computers. A University plan was introduced, targeted at post-secondary students. With these new offerings, Microsoft began to offer prepaid Office 365 subscriptions through retail outlets alongside the normal, non-subscription-based editions of Office 2013, which, in comparison, are only licensed for use on one computer.
On March 19, 2013, Microsoft detailed its plans to provide integration with the enterprise social networking platform Yammer for Office 365, such as the ability to use a single sign-on between the two services, shared feeds and document aggregation, and the ability to entirely replace the SharePoint news feed and social functionality with Yammer. The ability to provide a link to a Yammer network from an Office 365 portal was introduced in June 2013, with heavier integration to be introduced in July 2013.
On July 8, 2013, Microsoft unveiled Power BI, a suite of business intelligence and self-serve data mining tools for Office 365, to be released later in the year. Power BI is primarily incorporated into Excel, allowing users to use the Power Query tool to create spreadsheets and graphs using public and private data, and also perform geovisualization with Bing Maps data using the Power Map tool. Users will also be able to access and publish reports, and perform natural language queries on data. As a limited-time offer for certain markets, Microsoft also announced that those who purchased an Office 365 Home Premium or University subscription before September 28, 2013 would receive a free one-year Xbox Live Gold subscription.
In March 2014, Microsoft announced that it would rename the "Home Premium" plan to "Home", and add a new "Personal" plan for single users; these new options officially launched on April 15, 2014.
In June 2014, the amount of OneDrive storage offered to Office 365 subscribers was increased to 1 terabyte from 20 GB. On October 27, 2014, Microsoft announced that Office 365 subscribers would receive "unlimited" OneDrive storage. Due to abuse and a general reduction in storage options implemented by Microsoft, the 1 TB cap was reinstated in November 2015.
In June 2016, Microsoft made Planner available for general release. It is considered to be a competitor to Trello and to other agile team collaboration cloud services.
In April 2017, Microsoft announced that when Office 2016 loses mainstream support on October 13, 2020, access to OneDrive for Business, and Office 365-hosted servers for Skype for Business will become unavailable to those who are not using Office 365 ProPlus or Office perpetual in mainstream support. In July 2019, Microsoft announced that the hosted Skype for Business Online service would be discontinued on July 31, 2021, with users being redirected to the Microsoft Teams collaboration platform as its replacement. Since September 2019, Skype for Business Online is no longer offered to new subscribers.
On March 30, 2020, Microsoft announced that the consumer plans of Office 365 would be rebranded as "Microsoft 365" on April 21. Microsoft 365 is being positioned as a "subscription service for your life", as a superset of the existing Office 365 service with additional productivity tools for family and life management. In particular, Microsoft announced an upcoming Family Safety app, the addition of Microsoft Teams, and partnerships with third-parties such as Adobe, Blinkist, CreativeLive, Experian, and Headspace to include trial offers for their services for subscribers. The two Microsoft 365 plans succeed the existing Office 365 Personal and Home subscriptions, with no change in pricing.
Microsoft similarly announced that the Office 365 plans for small and medium-sized businesses would also be renamed Microsoft 365. The Office 365 branding remains in use for plans targeting enterprise markets.

Features

The Office 365 service consists of a number of products and services. All of Office 365's components can be managed and configured through an online portal; users can be added manually, imported from a CSV file, or Office 365 can be set up for single sign-on with a local Active Directory using Active Directory Federation Services. More advanced setup and features requires the use of PowerShell scripts.

Outlook

The email service, task management, calendar application, and contacts manager included with business and enterprise Office 365 subscriptions are under the Outlook on the web brand. It includes Outlook Mail, Outlook Calendar, Outlook People, and Outlook Tasks.
Microsoft introduced an email feature called Clutter with Office 365. Clutter remembers user's preferences as it comes to the relevance and importance of emails. It analyses user's pattern of behavior about email topics, if user keeps ignoring emails about a certain topic, Clutter moves those emails to a folder with the same name in Outlook. Users can enable and disable this feature by logging on to Office 365 portal.

Hosted services

Business and enterprise-oriented plans for Office 365 offer access to cloud-hosted versions of Office's server platforms on a software as a service basis, including Exchange, Skype for Business, SharePoint, and the browser-based Office Web Apps suite. Through SharePoint's OneDrive for Business functionality, each user also receives 1 TB of online storage. Certain plans also include unlimited personal cloud storage per user.
In lieu of Microsoft's enterprise software, Home plans for Office 365 include premium enhancements for Microsoft's consumer-level online services, including 1 terabyte of OneDrive storage for each user, along with 60 minutes of phone calls per month on the Microsoft-owned Skype VoIP service.
On business plans, Office 365 also includes cloud-based collaboration services such as Delve, Microsoft Teams, and Yammer

Office applications

Some plans for Office 365 also include access to the current versions of the Office desktop applications for both Windows and macOS for the period of the subscription. On Windows, it is installed using a "click-to-run" system which allows users to begin using the applications almost instantaneously, while files are downloaded in the background. Updates to the software are installed automatically, covering both security and feature updates. If an Office 365 subscription lapses, the applications enter a read-only mode where editing functionality is disabled. Full functionality is restored once a new subscription is purchased and activated. Publisher, Access and InfoPath are available on Windows only, and are not available for install on Mac operating systems.
Access to the Office Mobile apps for Android and iOS devices were originally limited to Office 365 subscribers but basic editing and document creation has since been made free for personal use. However, Office 365 is still required to unlock certain advanced editing features, use the apps on devices with screens larger than 10.1 inches, or to use the apps for business use. Outlook Groups was also made available as an app on Windows 10 Mobile.

Updates

The Office 365 platform uses a rolling release model; updates to the online components of the service are provided once per quarter. On launch, the 2010 versions of server components were used with Office 365. These services were automatically upgraded to their Office 2013 counterparts upon its release in February 2013. With the introduction of Office 2013, Office division head Kurt DelBene stated that minor and incremental updates to the Office desktop software would be provided on a similarly periodic basis to all Office 365 users by means of the streaming system, as opposed to the three-year cycle for major releases of Office that had been used in the past.
Although there are still "on-premises" or "perpetual" releases of Office on the three-year cycle used before, these versions do not receive new features or access to new cloud-based services as they are released on Office 365.

Office 365 Education

Office 365 Education, formerly Office 365 for Education and Microsoft Live@edu, is a free suite of hosted Microsoft services and applications that is intended for educational needs.
The program provides education institutions with a set of hosted collaboration services, communication tools, and mobile, desktop, and web-based applications, as well as data storage capabilities. The suite includes Microsoft applications for collaboration including: Office Live Workspace, Windows Live SkyDrive, Windows Live Spaces, Microsoft SharedView Beta, Microsoft Outlook Live, Windows Live Messenger, and Windows Live Alerts.
The suite is part of Microsoft Education Solutions. With the Microsoft Live ID, the student can sign-in and access multiple Microsoft applications such as Outlook Live, Windows Live Messenger, Windows Live Spaces, Windows Live SkyDrive, Windows Live Mobile, and others. Universities, colleges, and schools can enroll in the program through a free registration process.
In 2012, Live@edu moved under the umbrella of the Microsoft Office 365 service. The former Outlook Live Answers portal, a forum for asking questions on the Live@edu service, was discontinued on December 17, 2012. Transition was intended to be complete by September 2013.

Security

In December 2011, Microsoft announced that the Office 365 platform was now compliant with the ISO/IEC 27001 security standards, the European Union's Data Protection Directive, and the Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act for health care environments in the United States. At the same time, Microsoft also unveiled a new "Trust Center" portal, containing further information on its privacy policies and security practices for the service. In May 2012, Microsoft announced that Office 365 was now compliant with the Federal Information Security Management Act: compliance with the act would now allow Office 365 to be used by U.S. government agencies.
In spite of claiming to comply with European data protection standards, and in spite of existing Safe Harbor agreements, Microsoft has admitted that it will not refrain from handing over data stored on its European servers to US authorities under the Patriot Act.
In Finland, FICORA has warned Office 365 users of phishings and break-ins, diverting millions of euros to criminals. In September 2019, NCSC-FI created a detailed guide on how to protect Microsoft Office 365 against phishing attempts and any data breaches.
In July 2019, Hesse has outlawed the use of Office 365 in educational institutions, citing privacy risks.

Plans

Office 365 is available in a number of different subscription plans aimed at different needs and market segments, providing different sets of features at different price points. These include:

Reception

gave the 2013 update of Office 365 a 4.5 out of 5, praising its administration interfaces for being accessible to users with any level of expertise, the seamless integration of SkyDrive Pro into the Office 2013 desktop applications, and the service as a whole for being suitable in small business environments, while still offering "powerful" options for use in larger companies. However, the service was severely criticized for how it handled its 2013 update for existing users, and its lack of integration with services such as Skype and Yammer.