Program Updates in Microsoft 365 for Education

I represent a large educational institution in The Netherlands, comprising around 25,000 students and 2,500 staff. We have serious concerns regarding the upcoming storage changes announced by Microsoft for the Microsoft 365 for Education suite.

Previously, our institution enjoyed substantial storage allocations: 14PB for SharePoint, 5TB per user on OneDrive, and 100GB per mailbox with a 1.5TB expansion through email archives. These allocations were crucial for our digital operations and learning environments. However, with the new policy, our total pooled storage is drastically reduced to 225TB. This total is derived from the base 100TB plus an additional 125TB from our 2,500 A3 licensed staff (each contributing 50GB). Spread across our 27,500 users, this equates to approximately 8.18GB per user, with this storage being pooled across OneDrive, SharePoint, and Exchange.

Contrastingly, a free Microsoft 365 personal account provides a total of 20GB storage — 5GB on OneDrive and 15GB for mailbox. It's disheartening that as paying customers, our per-user storage allocation is now less than what is offered to free accounts. This change is bound to adversely affect our institution's digital learning environment and data management capabilities.

We urge Microsoft to re-evaluate these changes and consider the profound impact on paying educational customers like us, who now, paradoxically, receive less storage than free users.