Welcome to the world of Microsoft, where predictably, there are many options available and sometimes it seems intentionally confusing. Let's walk through the common business scenarios and see which plans fit those needs.
The first option you will see when selecting a Microsoft 365 plan is the option for Home or Business. Unless you are a single person home business and you don't have or plan to have your own email domain a la yourcompany.com, you'll want to choose a Business plan. The home plan does include the 365 Desktop apps, premium outlook.com email (with an @outlook.com email address), and 1TB of OneDrive cloud file storage.
The remaining Microsoft 365 plans will be for small business and enterprise. How does Microsoft define this? For purposes of Microsoft 365 services, business plans max out at 299 user accounts. Anything 300 users or above requires an enterprise account. For this article we will be focusing on small business solutions.
For our first scenario, we have a growing accounting firm with 45 employees. All of these employees have laptop computers and can work in the office or remotely. They require profession email, file sharing amongst all the employees, and the ability to crunch numbers on Excel spreadsheets. Since they are working with sensitive client financial data, they need to make sure this data is safeguarded on every device and that they have the ability to remove sensitive data if an employee leaves the company. The business premium plan for $20/month provides for all these by including desktop apps, company email, and advanced device management via MS Intune. It also provides for unlimited cloud email archiving and preservation so no important communication is ever lost.
For our second scenario, we have a small service company with 20 employees. 5 of these employees work in the office and need to work with Desktop applications like Word and Excel. 3 employees work both on the road and in the office and don't really need desktop applications. The other 12 employees are service technicians who have to be able to access email on their tablets and phones but don't have any other needs.
For the office employees, the Business Standard plan for $12.50/month fits the bill. This plan includes desktop apps and company email. The mobile employees don't need desktop apps for for those 3, the Business Basic plan at $5/month is sufficient. They have access to web apps for Email, Word, Excel, and Powerpoint, and they still have OneDrive file storage for all their documents. The service techs however have very basic needs, all they require access to is email. For this there is a plan called Exchange Online Kiosk, which for $2/month provides basic email services with a 2GB maximum mailbox size. In this scenario, by fitting the appropriate plans to each employee's needs, this small service company is able to save nearly $150 per month vs using Microsoft's recommended Standard plan for all the employees.
The other Business plan available from M365 is the Apps for Business, which does not include hosted email but does include access to Desktop Apps including Outlook, Word, Excel, Powerpoint, Publisher, Access, and OneDrive cloud file storage. If your business already has email hosted with another provider, such as Google G-suite, your web site host, or if you have an on-premise Email server, but you need the desktop apps, this is the plan you will want to have.
Another possibility is that your business is a non-profit. 501c3 (or equivalent for countries other than the USA) organizations are eligible for up to 300 Business Basic licenses at no cost, or 10 free Business Premium licenses, with a cost of just $5/month/user for anything over 10. The first step in determining if your non-profit is eligible is to register with Microsoft here.
We also recommend a backup solution (no, Microsoft does not back up your data!) so that email, OneDrive or Sharepoint files can be accessed and restored in the event of accidental or intentional deletion or edits, Microsoft account trouble - yes this can happen as well, or if there is a prolonged service outage. We provide this via our partners at Datto.
While you can purchase all the Microsoft 365 plans directly via their web site, we highly recommend working with a Microsoft Partner such as Harmony Technology Solutions to discuss your needs and make sure that you aren't losing money or functionality by trying to work with a plan that doesn't fit your business needs.