You’re about to get even more from your Office 365 Home or Personal subscription!

[Jared Spataro]

Today I’m pleased to share three exciting changes to Office 365 consumer subscriptions.  

Office on all your devices

The Office 365 Home and Office 365 Personal subscriptions currently include device install limits. Home limits subscribers to 10 devices in total (across five users) and Personal limits subscribers to one PC or Mac and one tablet.  Starting October 2, subscribers can install Office on an unlimited number of devices—and be signed into their accounts on up to five of those devices at the same time. 

Six licenses rather than five

The Office 365 Home subscription is already an incredible deal. For just $99.99 a year, five people can get their own licenses to Word, Excel, PowerPoint, Outlook, and OneNote—plus 1 TB of OneDrive cloud storage and other valuable apps and services. Starting October 2, we’re increasing the number of licenses in a Home subscription from 5 to 6. That’s right: we’re adding an additional person to the subscription with no change in price. To be clear, that’s 6 people with their own license and 1 TB of OneDrive cloud storage each—for a total of 6 TB. We’re also integrating the Home subscription more deeply into the Microsoft family service, so your subscription will automatically be shared with the people you’ve set up as members of your family.  

Everything you need in one place

Since launching the Office 365 consumer subscriptions in 2014, Office.com/MyAccount has been the starting point for all account management. We’re pleased to announce that you can now manage your Office 365 subscription directly on the Microsoft Account portal. —the single place to manage all your Microsoft subscriptions, redeem your Microsoft Rewards, and access other Microsoft benefits. 

If you’re already an Office 365 subscriber—thank you! Your subscription is about to get even more valuable. And if you’re not, buy today!  

For more information about these changes, please see our detailed FAQ or our updated terms and conditions.   

Amendment (9/24): For more information about sharing your Office 365 Home subscription, please see our sharing article and our detailed sharing FAQ.

[Gavin Francis]

Great news.

I’m so glad Microsoft is doubling down on its Office product offering - making it even more convincing to subscribe. I appreciate the bundling of different products/services into one packaged deal.

Looking forward to future improvements and customer benefits.  

[Brant Isom]

This is great. What about those of us on Office 365 University? Will we also see the device limit lifted from the current 2 Installs?

[Gary Quigley]

It would be great if you could configure the 6tb between the users, or use the space of any users not configured or not using any or some of it 

[Gavin Francis]

Totally agree with Gary Q that it would be great if we’re able to manage the allocation of the aggregated OneDrive storage. 

[Diego Dias]

Great news! MS is doing a great job on O365 

[Mary Branscombe]

or if those of us with only two people in the family could use the other 4 users to roll over to a second year of usage ;)

[KenyaWest]

What about subscription named Office 365 for Students? I have one, and I can say, it is always late in terms of any updates (integration in Microsoft account dashboard, increasing limits, new offerings) compared to Personal or Home subscriptions.

Will Office 365 for Students' limits be updated as well?

[EDIT Support]

I thought it was 15 devices, not 10 devices for Home? The sales pages shows "Up to 5 PCs/Macs, 5 tablets and 5 phones" I have clarified this (albeit for the Business products) with other Microsoft employees before and they eventually agreed with me that it was 15. Most people think it's 5.

[Don Norman]

These changes sounds nice. Now just bundle in Visio at a discount and I'll love my Office 365 subscription even more!

[Nick MacDonald]

I agree with Mary B.  If you subscribe to 365 Home, it would be reasonable to want the same amount of storage for a small family as you would for a large one.  

It would also be wise for this space to be shareable and allocated as needed to the family as a whole.

[Anand Tulpule]

I am a fan of Microsoft Products. I am a subscriber to Office 365 Home premium from the first day. Their support system is excellent. I am writing here something which will be of help to many. Recently I encountered a problem in Word. I could not save the document. I tried with my own knowledge. I think myself to be an expert and bla bla bla!!! Contacted support team. It took them 2 secession to resolve the issue. (Probably 3 hours). However the India expert worked out and finally resolved the issue very very successfully. SOLUTION: Kindly install Office 365 (64 Bit). You are done. Forgive me for my bad English. Regards.    

[Jörgen Bergström]

Excellent - still waiting for a possibility to go beyond that 1 TB per person however. When I joined the space was unlimited... now I cannot even buy more space.

[Jan Lausch]

Dear @Jared Spataro, 

thanks for this update - but might I argue that you acutally left out the (to me) most exciting news in "O365 home/personal product world":

The apparent return of the "custom domain" feature ("personalized email"): 

To be able to use my own domain to receive email natively within O365 home (= to use the MS Exchange mail server as MX for incoming email without the need to have a seperate provider for mailboxes). That feature was available in "outlook.com premium" in the US until last fall when it was axed.

This is the 2nd highest voted feature request on uservoice for O365 home and for many users it really is a key differenciator that makes or breaks the deal because it enables us to fully use the collaboration features in O365 with our own domain without workarounds.

So I was very excited when I read news about this FAQ and found that you actually beta-test this - and that I already have it in the "Premium Options" of my account.

I immediately tried it out - Adding and managing a domain and setting up one (!) mail address seems to work perfectly.

Thanks very much to listen to user input here! A very very welcome addition to the O365 home - product!

And very much to my surprise as I did not see this listed in the O365 roadmap.

But there is (yet) one major limitation: 

The way that it *appears* to be designed (and I'm just judging what I can see in the beta) is so that in your family domain, you can have eactly *one* mail address per account. (= 1 per Office license holder).

It's not possile to have secondary addresses / aliases e.g. to seperate newsletter signups or SPAM or catch-all.

Nor is it possible to create seperate accounts for the kids that don't have Office licenses (or in my case: for the printer).

I would argue that this limitation makes this feature less attractive to a large part of the target audience (if you have your own domain, usually you do a bit more than just 1 address per person).

Please allow the user to set up aliases (just as you can set up an extra secondary@outlook.com here) or extra mail addresses (account-independent).

That would make an incredible improvement to what is already an incredible improvement of an incredible product :) 

Also: How about allowing users to share contact lists within their family. Or calendars? 

Thanks for the great work and BR 

Jan

[George Marshall]

Great News indeed instead of 1PC + 1 Tablet. We have so many devices now. So for the rest it is, at present for me - Libra Office. My workhorse Laptop is a Linux Mint 19 OS  version. How I wish i could have Windows Office 360 in it also. Microsoft could earn a lot, selling, if they open up on Linux platform. Allow me to use my license here also!

I use chrome(Linux) and have word MS Office extension so i am managing in Linux. somewhat.

Wonder if anyone would reply to this mail.

George Santosh Marshall

[linyinlu]

I'm quite exciting to have more shares for my Office 365 Home, but what I really eager to know is the plan to have more storage for OneDrive. Currently 1T plan is not enough: the work folder has taken more than 500GB, including photos, videos, psd, and ai files, and it is becoming larger day by day. The 1T storage could soon becoming insufficient after a few years or even months, even for work file sync purpose.

[Mike Boehm]

Did this actually happen?  The Plans page still shows 1 computer and 1 tablet for the Personal version.

https://onedrive.live.com/about/en-us/plans/