Microsoft Office 365 - Exchange Online Implementation and Migration - Second Edition

At the heart of Office 365 are two essential subscription paths a customer can go through:

There are several other variants available to individuals, non-profits, education, and government which include a combination of features from the Enterprise plans at a lower cost:

In this book, we will focus on the Business and Enterprise plans, but check whether you qualify for the Nonprofit or Government Pricing plans to lower your operating costs.

The main difference between the two subscription types is that under the Business plans, the subscription provides high value but no licensing flexibility, and a maximum limit of 300 users. There are also several other limitations, which are addressed further in this chapter.

There are a number of different ways to purchase these:

Navigating the Microsoft licensing maze can be challenging; most people can get quite confused by all the various plans and licensing models.

The best approach is to write down what features and functionality you want for your organization, including your people plans for the next three years. Then arrange people into groups that require similar feature sets. Users in the office may require an Office 365 Enterprise E3 license which gives them the desktop version of Office with e-mail, but users who work remotely may only require an Enterprise E1 license and utilize the online Office applications.

Once you have grouped your users together, you can then look at the Office 365 subscription plans and make the right decisions. If you're still lost, you may need to work with a Microsoft partner who specializes in Office 365 to help you make the right licensing choice.

The Office 365 Business plans provide amazing value and functionality for small and growing organizations:

For many businesses, it will provide far more functionality than they may ever utilize, but there are some key limitations that must be considered prior to purchase.

The Office 365 Enterprise plans allow for an unlimited number of users and even more features and licensing options.

The key bundles available range from plans E1-E5, and the Kiosk (K1) plan. Let's take a look at the features available in each of the following plans:

Individual components can also be purchased. The individual plans are listed here:

Now that you know a bit more about the Business and Enterprise subscription levels, let's delve deeper into helping you make a choice between them.

The Enterprise plans contain similar feature sets to the Business plans, but are able to go above and beyond their limitations.

Some key benefits and features are:

Let's look at some scenarios where you might choose one subscription type over the other:

As you can see, there are quite a number of choices and scenarios available to organizations of all types and sizes. Making the correct choice involves identifying the requirements and which options address them.

There are many ways to get started with an Office 365 subscription. Some of these ways include:

Let us now explore these options in the following sub-sections.

We recently learned about the various subscription options. Now it's time to sign up for the service. In the following steps, we are simply going to sign up for a trial-based subscription. This will allow us the flexibility to choose how we add licenses in the near future.

You now have a decision to make. Do the Enterprise plans include the features you require or do you have more than 300 users or plan to grow to more than 300 users in the near future? If yes, then you need to create an Enterprise trial. Let's take a look at the process to give you its overview.

To get started, let's head over to the Office 365 site. Simply go to http://www.office.com/ and sign-up for a free FOR BUSINESS trial from the home page, as shown in the following screenshot. By default you will be directed to sign up for a Business premium trial. If you require an Enterprise trial follow the link See all plans and pricing options for Home or Business. Locate the Enterprise E3 Free trial link at the bottom of the page:

Congratulations! You have created your Office 365 tenant with an Enterprise E3 trial. In the following chapters, we will explore the setup processes required to fully configure your tenant to meet your organization's specific requirements.

Office 365 offers many ways to subscribe and all sorts of licensing combinations. Whether you're a small business or an enterprise, you have a number of ways to get started. The good news is that you can start a trial subscription and always associate your long-term licenses to the trial, leveraging any method. We learned about the licensing available within the service, which should clarify how you proceed. By this point you should be deciding how these licenses fit your organization and whether you are going to sign-up directly, work with a Microsoft Deployment Partner, or engage an Enterprise Agreement with Microsoft.

As we reflect on the sign up process, you can see how Microsoft designed the process  to be greatly simplified. Microsoft focused on minimizing many decision points for a trial. The fact is, it is a trial, so why complicate the sign up process more than it needs to be? Either way, in the end, your team managing and configuring the service will be required to do all the tweaking and tuning, based on business and technical decisions made within the organization.

In conclusion, you should now be ready to start getting more familiar with the service: configuring it to your specifications, starting the integration process, and finally either migrating or starting to use the service full-time. Before your trial ends, you will need to obtain or assign the licensing plan that best fits your subscription.

Now that we have established a subscription, in the next chapter we will focus on using the admin portal. We will also start walking through some key initial configuration steps.