Microsoft 365 Q & A
Questions we are often asked regarding the Microsoft 365 Products…….
As of April 21, 2020, the official branding of Microsoft’s productivity suite has changed from Office 365 to just Microsoft 365. The new naming convention reflects Microsoft’s strategy of providing a single complete productivity platform for its customers. From the customer’s perspective, there is no separation between Windows 10, Office 365, and Azure—it is all just one platform, the Microsoft 365 platform. Fortunately, from the viewpoint of current subscribers, the change from Office 365 to Microsoft 365 is not going to have much of an immediate practical impact. In general, the subscription you had on April 20 is the same as the subscription you had on April 21, only with a different name.
To provide customers with the greatest amount of flexibility, different payment options are available.
- Monthly commitment payment: You pay month by month, and you can cancel at any time.
- Annual commitment payment: You sign up for a one-year subscription, but you can choose to pay month to month or pay for the entire year at the time you sign up. There is a discount for using this payment option.
- Annual commitment payment: You sign up for a one-year subscription, but you can choose to pay month to month or pay for the entire year at the time you sign up.
No, Teams comes as part of the Office 365 suite. Teams is deeply integrated with other elements of Office 365, for example files shared in teams are actually in SharePoint, Planner tabs in Teams come from Planner etc.
People who don’t already have a paid Microsoft 365 commercial subscription can download the free version of Teams.
With the free flavor of Microsoft Teams, you get unlimited chats, audio and video calls, and 10GB of file storage for your entire team, plus 2GB of personal storage for each individual. Microsoft Teams integrates with all online Office apps, including Word, Excel, PowerPoint, and OneNote, as well as more than 140 business apps. You can add as many as 300 people to your network of contacts, who can be inside or outside your organization.
Be aware that the free version of Microsoft Teams is available only to those without a paid commercial Office 365 subscription. Office 365 subscribers who try to sign up for Teams are redirected to a managed account for their existing plan. Customers who don’t have a Teams license as part of an Office 365 subscription can sign up for a free one-year trial.
If you have an Office 365 subscription and still want to use Teams for free, you can simply sign up with a different email address. If your address is not already established as a Microsoft Account, Teams will set it up accordingly.