Working with Microsoft 365 with your business, it’s no longer about a way to organise your business email server, have top of the line word processing and spreadsheets, and software that the team already knows their way around. The name change wasn’t to confuse customers, rather to reposition Microsoft’s range of cloud services to ‘more than just Office.’Īnd it certainly is more than the traditional Office suite that they offer as part of the package, with products such as SharePoint, Teams, file storage, and more available as part of the deal.

In 2020, Microsoft changed the name of its packages from Office 365 to Microsoft 365 – for business as well as personal accounts.

Owners can download the full Microsoft application suite locally, as well as use online, cloud-based versions of the Office apps, as well as a range of other Microsoft cloud services for business. Subscriptions instead are yearly, dependant on the number of monthly users. Office 365, introduced in 2011, not only heralded the start of a new subscriptions model for the Microsoft suite, but a move towards web applications and a supporting ecosystem for Microsoft. For instance, if you had Word 2010, you’d need to purchase a new license if you wanted to update to Word 2013. Old Office licenses were for a particular version and number of users and were a flat fee. In the past, businesses bought a version of Office that included a particular version of the suite of products (Word, Excel, Outlook, PowerPoint, etc.), all available to install locally onsite.

That’s due to the way in which Office is now offered for businesses. And it’s not just Windows users that can benefit from this suite of applications, it’s Mac users, too – but there are some limitations.īut before we get into that – why the name change? What was previously just Office is now Office 365. Office 365 is the Microsoft productivity suite with brand name recognition worldwide.

Out of office on mac