A few weeks ago, we announced new Microsoft 365 offerings for small and medium-sized businesses, including the Microsoft 365 Personal and Family Subscriptions, the first consumer offerings from Microsoft 365. We also announced that the following product name changes will go into effect on April 21, 2020 (product name change only, no pricing or feature changes at this time):
- Office 365 Business Essentials will become Microsoft 365 Business Basic
- Office 365 Business Premium will become Microsoft 365 Business Standard
- Microsoft 365 Business will become Microsoft 365 Business Premium
- Office 365 Business and Office 365 ProPlus will both become Microsoft 365 Apps, and we will use “for business” and “for enterprise” to distinguish them
Office 365 for Enterprise, Firstline Workers, Education and Government are not being renamed.
Back in 2014, we introduced a new cross-suite service for Office 365 commercial and education customers called Office 365 Groups, which enables people to create public or private groups. The first apps to take advantage of the Office 365 Groups service included Outlook, SharePoint, OneNote, and Skype for Business. Today, Office 365 Groups power collaboration experiences in more than 22 apps across Microsoft 365, and partners build custom solutions for their customers leveraging Microsoft Graph APIs and the PowerApps framework. Whether it’s a Team in Microsoft Teams, a Community in Yammer, or an Outlook Group, the Office 365 Groups platform enables users to create, share and discover knowledge and information.
Microsoft 365 is the world’s productivity cloud and it represents our vision for the future of Microsoft productivity tools—an integrated set of apps and services that puts artificial intelligence and other cutting-edge innovations to work for you. To reflect the fact that Office 365 Groups power collaboration across Microsoft 365, Office 365 Groups will become Microsoft 365 Groups. These changes will happen over time and will be reflected in all the connected endpoints over the upcoming quarters.
--The Microsoft 365 Groups team