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.