ANNOUNCEMENT: Microsoft 365 Business Premium & Office 365 E1 grant discontinuation

This is such a pity and disappointment, but at least this is a good warning to charities and non-profits to not rely on these free offerings from Microsoft. Obviously it's absolutely at Microsoft's discretion whether to offer these free services for non-profits and this is a good example of why that needs to be remembered so charities avoid getting hooked-in and locked-in to the Office 365 platform.

We were using the free charity business premium for just 3 users to be able to write charity admin documents, share on Sharepoint and meet using Teams. This is fairly low level use, so we can't really justify paying for the premium when there are free alternatives out there, even if those will be less convenient.

I had been planning to add our domain to Office 365 to start using it for our email too, but I'm glad we didn't, because it would only have added to our reliance on Office 365 and made it harder to switch away again. 

This is a real pity and disappointment. We had just started using Microsoft for our charity admin - we're a small charity and planned to use 3 users on business premium to manage our membership lists, write documents using desktop office, share files securely through Sharepoint and use Teams for our meetings. While it was a much better experience for us to do this all through the Office 365 platform, there are other free alternatives out there so it would be difficult for us to justify paying for these features from the Charity's funds.
We were also going to switch our domain over to use Office 365 for email but we've been stung before by ever changing pricing and non-profit offerings so this change is a good warning to charities that the Microsoft non-profit offering should not be relied upon.

This news was a big disappointment, as I have been preparing to create a Power App for my group. That would require the premium licenses for the connection to Dataverse. Although Microsoft granted per-app licenses to nonprofits, this change emphasizes the point that Microsoft may take away benefits at any time.
It doesn't instill confidence to know that our group may have processes which are dependent on an app we create, only to see a change in what that app may cost us at a later time. I may yet build the Power App, but I'm evaluating other options as well.

-Bob B.

Hi Leslie_Robbins​ and the TSI team

Can you please confirm the minimum number of paid seats that are required for a nonprofit to enter into an Enterprise Agreement (EA) in order to get the larger number of free Office 365 E1 grant?

I've seen 250 seats quoted by a CSP and a nonprofit was advised 500 seats by a Partner. Hoping for some clarity on this.

Thanks
Matt