Microsoft Announces Price Increase for M365 & O365 SKUs - Scheduled for March 2022

There is one thing that organisations have benefitted from Microsoft 365/Office 365 Business and Enterprise plans in terms of pricing, and that is consistency. Unfortunately, in Nigeria, we can’t say the same is true as a result of the unstable exchange rate.

For over 10 years, this is the first substantive price update since Office 365 was released in June 2011, and it reflects the significant value that has been added over the years. Microsoft 365 was launched in March 2017, and also has reflected the product innovation that Microsoft has engineered into the respective plans to meet the changing needs of customers. This change will go into effect on March 1, 2022 – providing affect customers with a few months of advance notification, and to enable many organisations accommodate the increase in their next fiscal year’s budget.

What Has Changed in Office 365/Microsoft 365?

Since launch, Microsoft has added or introduced 25 applications:

Teams, Access, Bookings, Delve, Forms, GroupMe, Kaizala, Lens, Lists, OneDrive, OneNote Class Notebook, Planner, Power Apps, Power Automate, Power BI, Publisher, SharePoint, Skype for Business, Staff Hub, Stream, Sway, To-Do, Visio, Whiteboard, and Yammer

They have also developed and released over 1400 capabilities including:

Communication & Collaboration: Together Mode, Custom Backgrounds, Front Row, live captions with speaker attribution, group chat with up to 250 people, polls in Teams meetings, and virtual breakout rooms; Whiteboard; Lists; Planner; Shifts; Forms; real-time collaboration in Word, Excel, PowerPoint desktop apps; @mentions; assign tasks; modern comments; auto-save; expanded cloud storage
Security & Compliance: DLP for email and documents, sensitivity labels, and message encryption; Content Search, eDiscovery, and core Litigation Hold; MFA
AI & Assistance: Automatic video transcription & face detection in Stream; Acronyms in Word; Live captions & subtitles; Ideas in Word, Natural language query in Excel; Presenter Coach; Ideas in PowerPoint; Resume Assistant; Designer in PowerPoint; Editor in Word & Outlook; Researcher in Word; Translate

***The image above represents Microsoft 365 value timeline from 2011 – 2021***

Planning Ahead – What SKUs are Impacted By The Increase?

With the above innovative technological advancements that customers have enjoyed so far, Microsoft has effected this increase in the below SKUs:

Enterprise

Microsoft 365 E3 – ($32 to $36)
Office 365 E5 – ($35 to $38)
Office 365 E3 – ($20 to $23)
Office 365 E1 – ($8 to $10)

SMB

Microsoft 365 Business Basic – ($5 to $6)
Microsoft 365 Business Premium – ($20 to $22)

Education

No change at this time

What’s new in Business Premium since its launch?

Examples of new value-added to Microsoft 365 Business Premium since that product was first launched include:

Azure AD Premium Plan 1
Azure Information Protection Premium Plan 1
Office 365 DLP
Microsoft Defender for Office 365 Plan 1
Shared Computer Activation
Azure Virtual Desktop (WVD)
Universal Print

What Licensing Program Is Affected?

This new pricing applies to commercial Volume Licensing (EA, Open Value, Open Value Subscription), CSP, and Web Direct, however, it should be noted that existing customers are not impacted until their next renewal on or after March 1, 2022. This announcement does not include any changes to the licensing or usage rights of the Microsoft 365 or Office 365 products, outside the specific changes that impact Audio Conferencing.

So, there you have it! If your users are on any of the impacted SKUs, now is the time to start planning for the price increase so you are not met with unexpected budget constraints in March 2022.

Let’s know if you are currently not seeing value for your investment, or not benefitting from the above-listed features in your Microsoft 365 or Office 365 plans. Reach out to us today – marketing@ha-shem.com – so we can plan a consumption workshop with you.