Microsoft 365

Microsoft 365?is a product family of?productivity software, collaboration and?cloud-based?services?owned by?Microsoft. It encompasses online services such as?Outlook.com,?OneDrive,?Microsoft Teams, programs formerly marketed under the name?Microsoft Office?(including applications such as?Word,?Excel,?PowerPoint, and?Outlook?on?Microsoft Windows,?macOS,?mobile devices, and?on the web), enterprise products and services associated with these products such as?Exchange Server,?SharePoint, and?Yammer. It also covers subscription plans encompassing these products, including those that include subscription-based licenses to desktop and mobile software, and hosted email and intranet services.

The branding?Office 365?was first introduced in 2010 to refer to a subscription-based software as a service platform for the corporate market, including hosted services such as Exchange, SharePoint, and?Lync Server, and Office on the web. Some plans also included licenses for the?Microsoft Office 2010?software. Upon the release of?Office 2013, Microsoft began to promote the service as the primary distribution model for the Microsoft Office suite, adding consumer-focused plans integrating with services such as OneDrive and?Skype, and emphasizing ongoing feature updates (as opposed to non-subscription?licenses, where new versions require purchase of a new license, and do not receive feature updates).

In July 2017, Microsoft introduced a second brand of subscription services for the enterprise market known as Microsoft 365, combining Office 365 with?Windows 10?Enterprise?volume licenses?and other cloud-based?security?and?device management?products. On April 21, 2020, Office 365 was rebranded as Microsoft 365, to emphasize the services current inclusion of products and services beyond the core Microsoft Office software family (including cloud-based productivity tools and?artificial intelligence?features). Most products that were called Office 365 were renamed as Microsoft 365 on the same day.In October 2022, Microsoft announced that it would discontinue the "Microsoft Office" brand by January 2023, with most of its products and online productivity services being marketed primarily under the "Microsoft 365" brand.

History

As Office 365

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, with a launch aimed originally at?corporate?users. Facing growing competition from?Google's similar service?Google Apps, Microsoft designed the Office 365 platform to "bring together" its existing online services (such as the?Business Productivity Online Suite) into "an always-up-to-date cloud service" incorporating?Exchange Server?(for e-mail),?SharePoint?(for internal social networking, collaboration, and a public web site), and?Lync?(for communication,?VoIP, and conferencing). 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, expanding 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?(whose integration with Office was a major feature of the 2013 suite).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, perpetually-licensed editions of Office 2013 (which are only licensed for use on one computer, and do not receive feature updates).

On March 19, 2013, Microsoft detailed its plans to provide integration with the enterprise?social networking?platform?Yammer?(which they had acquired in 2012) 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 (such as a Yammer app for SharePoint and single sign-on) 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 (previously available as a beta plug-in known as GeoFlow). 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 (but notably excluding the US), Microsoft also offered a free one-year?Xbox Live?Gold subscription with any purchase of an Office 365 Home Premium or University subscription, until September 28, 2013.[16]

From April 15, 2014, Microsoft renamed the "Home Premium" plan to "Home,” and added a new "Personal" plan for single users.

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 "unlimited" OneDrive storage for Office 365 subscribers.?However, 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 with the ending of mainstream support for?Office 2016?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.

• In October 2017, the existing Outlook.com Premium service was discontinued and folded exclusively into Office 365, with all Personal and Family subscribers subsequently being upgraded to 50 GB of storage.