Beginning on October 1st, 2014, a trio of Office 365 plans will be launched to replace current small to mid-size business plans. Designed to accommodate businesses with up to 250 employees (although all three plans cap at 300 seats), these Office 365 tiers are tailored to meet the evolving needs of small business owners.

These new plans come in the wake of astonishing new visibility into Microsoft's development plans for Office 365; only two weeks ago, Microsoft released the Office 365 roadmap, a visual representation of new updates rolling out, in development, or recently launched. Together with the new plans, small business owners should have no problem fitting Office 365 into their information management strategies.

The New Office 365 Plans

The three new plans for business owners are designed based on feedback from current SMB customers, especially regarding starting a new Office 365 account and scaling up data needs over time. The plans will be:

• Office 365 Business: includes the full suite of Office applications like OneDrive (now with 1 TB of storage per user), Publisher, OneNote, Outlook, Word, Excel, and PowerPoint. In addition, all documents will be sharable across most devices, including tablets and smartphones.
• Office 365 Business Essentials: The meat and bones of cloud services including business class calendars and email, Office Online, video conferencing, cloud storage, and many more features.
• Office 365 Business Premium: The top plan for small to mid-sized businesses - and simply includes all features from Business and Business Essentials plans. Premium plans save $1.00 per user per month by opting for this plan rather than combining the two lower plans into one ($8.25/user/month and $5.00/user/month).

Rather than being a sudden rollout, these new plans will replace current SMB plans over time. Existing users may wait until renewal after October 1st, 2015 before moving to the new plans.

New Office 365 Plans - Benefits

One of the most obvious benefits of the new plans is an all-new choice - the Office 365 Business plan for $8.25/user/month. This plan is perfect for those that want all of the Office 365 apps across all devices, but have no current need for video conferencing or other features included with Business Essentials. The new increased cloud storage of 1 TB per user makes this plan very cost-effective.

The new plans will also offer enhanced flexibility. Any plan member will be able to upgrade to an Enterprise plan or another business plan. You can move all users at once or keep individual users on different plans based on your needs. Only a few users may need access to video conferencing, for example.

You can read more about the new Office 365 plans on the official Microsoft blog or contact Vorsite for more information.