

At a moment when businesses are facing extraordinary health and economic challenges, we are pleased to bring our consumer and small and medium-sized business customers into this growing Microsoft 365 family. And for small and medium-sized businesses, that includes new capabilities in Microsoft Teams to help you host rich meetings and events online cloud file storage and sharing capabilities so you can collaborate from anywhere and security and identity solutions to safeguard your business. Today, we call it “the world’s productivity cloud” and it represents our vision for the future of Microsoft productivity tools-an integrated set of apps and services that puts artificial intelligence (AI) and other cutting-edge innovations to work for you. Microsoft 365 began in 2017 as a licensing bundle for enterprise customers-a combination of Windows, Office, and Enterprise Mobility and Security (EMS). Going forward, all of these products will use the Microsoft 365 brand. I’m pleased to follow up here to announce related changes to our Office 365 subscriptions for small and medium-sized businesses-and to Office 365 ProPlus. Any help you can offer is appreciated.Today, we announced the Microsoft 365 Personal and Family Subscriptions, the first consumer offerings from Microsoft 365. My concern is that as soon as I purchase licenses under our corporate card that the Partner assigned user licenses will suddenly get rescinded or put on hold, potentially impacting business continuity. Most importantly can I ‘phase in’ applying our newly purchased M365 Business licenses gradually, or do all licenses need to be swapped out at the same time, potentially introducing issues that we weren’t aware of?.Does anything get triggered at the partner side, when we purchase the new licenses that might impact the user base, or do the newly purchased Microsoft Business licenses just sit ‘dormant’ until I start applying them to user accounts, so that they replace the Enterprise licenses? I’m preparing to purchase the new licenses under our own corporate credit card as the payment method as opposed to being charging our MS Partner who we’re moving away from, but I have a question about how the Microsoft tenant will behave as I purchase and swap out the current licenses with the new ones.We have evaluated our requirements, and the legal retention requirements aren’t needed so apart from some of the storage capacity and the compliance features, are M365 Business Basic and M365 Business Standard equivalent to Office 365 E1 and Office 365 E3?.

We are downsizing to Microsoft Business licensing, as opposed to Enterprise license, which we were previously issued through an MS Partner (we will be self-managing now)Ī few questions about the process of transitioning our licensing:
