Office 365 and Microsoft 365 | What’s the Difference? (Video)

Microsoft 365 is a cloud-based subscription suite that encompasses Office and other productivity apps, cloud services, device management, and security. This recorded webinar focuses on an overview of the updated Microsoft 365 offerings and Office 365 products available to business and enterprise customers.

In this recorded webinar we uncovered what apps and services are included, looked at pricing, and helped clarify questions regarding these offerings.

Transcript below:

Ziad: Hello, everyone, and welcome to our webinar series for…not series, is just a webinar for Microsoft 365 versus Office 365. We’ve done a host of other series and we’ll continue to have series on that front. Make sure you visit our website at encorebusiness.com and you can see all the other webinars that we have done as well. So, today is gonna be a really, really interesting webinar, because we’re talking about two of the very same but very different products. And so, you know, traditionally what we’ve known to be Office 365 has now actually evolved to in many, you know, aspects to Microsoft 365. And, you know, the different name changes that we’ve come through from a licensing perspective, and help answer any type of questions that may arise for your organization specifically. But before we dive in, just a quick, you know, introduction as to, you know, who we are, we are Encore Business Solutions, a Gold Microsoft partner, you know, they’ve been operating over the last 30 years, both in Canada.

So, we have our headquarters here locally, as well as in the U.S. with, you know, five different locations throughout, you know, serving over 1,200 customers on various different types of offerings and implementations, including ERP or CRM systems for Dynamics 365, for instance, or other business intelligence or dashboarding tools like Power BI and Power Platform in general, including Power Apps and Power Automate, as well as Office 365 or Microsoft 365 solutions as well. And so, there’s a whole bunch of basically anything Microsoft related we could practically do. And so, if there are any other questions that arise or other types of opportunities that you think you might wanna reach out to us for, I will share my email at the end, and you will also receive an email from me post as well so you can definitely, you know, respond and share your thoughts there.

Not too much time on this slide, though, what we’re focusing again on today is this idea of what Office 365 is, how is that any different than the Microsoft solutions that are out there, and then some of the licensing and how that’s, you know, up to date, as we speak today. Now, one of the slides I always like to share and I’ve been sharing for some time is this idea of a changing modern workplace. And, I mean, last year, we did a series around the office stuff and really, we talked about all the different tools and devices. Now, people are collaborating way more than we used to traditionally. And, you know, when there’s a diverse community, different generations coming together, how workers are gonna be working remotely, and guess what, March 2020, COVID-19 hit, everybody’s working remotely as much as possible. And, you know, that’s really shifted the dynamics of what we’ve kind of been foreshadowing, perhaps, of what’s to come.

And organizations quickly realize they had to be on the cloud as soon as possible. And so, you know, Encore kind of supported those customers and clients to get, you know, their infrastructure on the cloud, get their hardware, get, you know, their solutions and build a roadmap to how it’s going to look and implement a lot of these things. And of those solutions, I mean, with Microsoft Teams and how that’s kind of transformed and been a solution, those solutions, those productivity suite applications and services were actually part of a very, you know, in a subscription-based Office 365 licenses.

Amongst other ones, like the Dynamics licenses, for example, which allows you to, you know, become on the cloud, for example, if you were on Great Plains or GP as an ERP system, you can then be on Dynamics Business Central, which is the cloud more updated version as well. So there’s, you know, lots of different opportunities as far as how this modern workplace has changed and then has really changed again this year. So, just another kind of thought on that, as far as, you know, how other organizations are doing things and how everyone is basically surviving, you know, the economies of today.

So, to the point of Office 365, I mean, the way we know Office 365 and the way it really started way back when was and it is the idea of having these productivity tools and apps that could help us like Microsoft Word or Excel and PowerPoint really. And soon, that became an offering to be products that you can download on your desktop or get an upgrade every year. And, you know, so people could be running, you know, 2007 Word and, you know, someone else would be on the 2010 and so on and so forth. And all the way up till I mean, still exists to 2019 you can still do that. But, you know, from a 365 perspective, they started adding components like OneNote, and Outlook, and all of these different applications and services throughout that time.

And as you kind of build that solution, it actually ended up being quite greater than an office or a typical office implementation or typical office type of business use. So, even when you added like communications, for example, with Skype for Business, which then we know later shifted to something like Microsoft Teams, or having the ability to now have SharePoint sites on the back end, when that came in, when was it, 2013 or something, a nightmare at that time but, you know, a very luxury to have now, which is basically the back end of most of the other products like Teams or OneDrive for Business, for example, right?

So, you know, then applications like Yammer, and maybe I can touch on that a little bit today as well. And other tools that are in here that I haven’t even listed here like Delve and a whole bunch more, which really, you know, gave power to this idea of having Office in the cloud. And what that meant was you are now able to not only having to download an application every year, you can have online access, right? So, you can go to the web browser and access your Office. You can now open it up on your tablet, or your iPod, or your, you know, iPhones that came out and Android phones that came out, or PCs and every device possible. Because it allowed you to basically, you know, work on those documents anywhere remotely even. And again, you don’t have to upgrade, you know, your product because each year everything was updated. So, you know, someone could be sharing a document, you know, and how it used to work traditionally is you would have, you know, different versions.

So, some users would be on the new version, some users would be on the old version. And, you know, the old version, yeah, you have to update to the new version to even be able to read the document, right? So, there wasn’t much support there but now with Office 365, like, you could literally go in on any of these applications and share files and collaborate in real-time without actually having to have any worry about updates and what that’s gonna look like because that’s covered in the subscription model that’s there.

And it’s easy to scale. So, you could start off with the lowest basic tier of Office licensing, which we’re gonna talk about is the business basic, and move up all the way to the enterprise level licenses, you know, spontaneously. I mean, literally, it takes minutes for us to be able to upgrade, or downgrade, or provision these licenses to you. So, you know, as you require, you know, more functionality, you can upgrade those licenses. And for some users, if you require less functionality, you can always downgrade those licenses and mix them up too. So, you could pick one business basic and another one completely different and still be able to collaborate amongst the users and amongst the people in your organization.

And the last one, you know, we deal with clients all the time here for IT costs. There are still clients now who, you know, have third party IT providers that are, you know, charging $100,000, $150,000 a year. And one of the biggest, you know, kind of requests that they ever get is, you know, can we do a password change, for example, right? That eliminates this because it allows you to be the administrator to your account. And you can manage, and see, and access, and look at your security, and look at what’s being assigned to users and how they’re interacting on those environments as an admin user, right? So, you have control over your licenses through this idea of being now in the cloud.

So, this was Office, right? It allows you to be, you know…and in the next few slides as well, I’ll kind of storm through just telling you, okay, well, you can have this cross-platform experience where, like I was mentioning, you could be on an Android, you can be on an iPhone, you can be on any device, basically, and be able to access the same, you know, kind of user interface and the same consistent experience throughout, right? You can be secure on the cloud. So, you no longer have to get, what was it, like, Norton Antivirus or Masters and all the other different types of virus protections because the cloud has built-in security functionality. And we will talk about those in some of the other webinars that we have as well. And again, it’s all, you know, subscription-based, so you pay on as an operational cost, which is, you know, month to month basis, and so it’s all manageable.

So, you know, to that front, I’m gonna storm through these slides as well so we can go into the licensing component and what Microsoft 365 really became. Well, so again, we talked about SharePoint, how you can organize those ideas. OneDrive, which was included in Office 365 as a terabyte of storage for every user that you assign. It could be used for personal storage or work, it’s obviously best practice to use it as your personal storage and then upload those files to something like Teams, which again, is running on SharePoint on the back end, right?

So, you can use Teams for video and audio conferencing, but it’s way more than just something like Teams for audio and video like or sharing content. It’s way different in the fact that you can have different project teams. And all of those components around having third party applications that you can now integrate with Teams and how Teams integrates with the entire Microsoft family as a whole, and how you can collaborate. Very, very different from other products out there such as like Zoom or Slack or other things like that as well.

Exchange Online, which was another tier that Microsoft had kind of put up as far as mailbox storage and email communications and so on. And Yammer, which was, you know, in short, really, it’s the Facebook for corporate, right, so you can have private messages and communications and have a more of a, you know, relaxed environment for your organization to kind of have some fun on-site as well, which again, can be integrated.

So, all those apps and the other ones as well, and some of these actually might not be related like Dynamics, but essentially, all of these applications were now sitting in Office 365, that, you know, traditionally weren’t really Office 365 applications, right? Like, you never really had Power Apps, or Power Automate, or Power BI, like, that’s not really an Office productivity thing, it could be a full-on implementation. For instance, many times, the Dynamics environment can actually be built out of the Power Apps and we won’t get into the technicalities of that. But the idea is that these applications now have outgrown the expectation of what an Office 365 offering was to something bigger. And that’s something bigger was the Microsoft 365. And Microsoft 365 includes the Office 365. And we’ll kind of talk about this a little bit more as well. But the Microsoft offerings include the Office 365, but as well as other services. And those additional services that are included, you know, for the Microsoft solutions, which by the way existed before as well.

So, there was always the Microsoft 365 and Office 365. The only change that really happened was some of the name changes from Office, which outgrew that solution went into the Microsoft 365 family, right? And so, within that, the additional services outside of what’s included in Office 365, that is part of Microsoft 365 is Windows 10 upgrade, right? So, you get upgraded, your hardware gets upgraded to Windows 10 Enterprise, as well as you get additional security components to it. So, Enterprise Mobility and Security or EMS and some machine learning components as well.

And so, the Microsoft 365 solution that exists currently includes this. Now, there’s three tiers or three categories of these solutions. The first is the Microsoft 365 business category. Now, this is probably where most of the change happened. And so, this category was created to basically take some of the business licenses of Office 365 and move them into this category, which were, you know, again, like I mentioned, were becoming too…was basically outgrown. So, they went from, you know, being a youth size in Office to an adult size now in Microsoft 365.

The next category was the enterprise category. And this again existed before. It was meant for larger organizations really that wanted, you know, more security and device management functionalities. But really, you could be a small business and still require a need and use the enterprise functionality, there is no actual cutoff. The only cutoff that actually exists would be if you have anything more than 300 users, you can’t be in business, you have to be an enterprise. But you can always be in business and you can always be less than 300 users and still require the enterprise functionality. So, there’s no restriction for business users at that time.

And the third category, which we’ll probably talk the least about today at least, is the education. And mainly we’re not going to talk about that because it’s focused on an industry but, you know, there are education plans that are included in Microsoft 365 that were really there to enhance the learning environment for both teachers and students in that environment. So, these are the three categories that Microsoft 365 had.

So, let’s talk about the Microsoft Business 365 for a second. So, the previous image that I had was really around the Office 365 and all the applications that are there. Now the change that has happened has moved from Office now to Microsoft 365. So, the names that I’m gonna have are gonna be all the new ones, but I can also refer to them as their traditional names. So, in case you need to search and compare the plans you can. So, Microsoft 365 Business Basic is the first one. This is the out of the box, you know, cheapest type of product that’s out there for this category. This used to be called Office 365 Business Essentials, okay?

So, it’s the same license, the same components are within it, meaning all the versions for the application. So, you get Word, Excel, PowerPoint, all of those things are online and the services Teams, OneDrive, SharePoint, and Exchange. So, you still get that 1 terabyte of OneDrive, you still have the ability to host meetings in Teams for 250 users, as well as you can do live meetings now for up to 10,000 people on those calls as well. And you still get the Exchange mailbox and custom email domain. So, all of that components is the same.

This is great for people who are remote a lot of the times and still have secure Wi-Fi access, right? So, secure internet access, that they can go on the browser and quickly, you know, source that. This license, you do not need to or do not want to and you…well, you can’t. But basically, you wouldn’t have to download any of the applications on your toolbar, you would just have everything online on a web browser. So, this is the limitation of that or for some people, they actually like that more. So, this is the cheapest of them. It’s USD 5, currently and CAD 6.4 per user per month today.

The next license up from here really goes into what was traditionally known as Office 365 Business Premium. And this has now been classified as Business Standard. So, Microsoft 365 Business Standard was now giving you the ability to not only download the applications on your toolbar, so you can have, you know, Outlook as an app on your phone, or your tablet, or your laptop, and Word, and Excel, and PowerPoint, and so on, all of those other apps that we talked about OneNote and everything else, as well as the services like Microsoft Teams Exchange, SharePoint, and OneDrive. So, you can still have those applications, again, as part of your local on your toolbar and your folders as well as online. So, you can access it both ways.

And you also get the ability now to, you know, have that user, the one user be, you know, using the cross-platform experience. So you can have this downloaded on your phone, you could then also have it downloaded on your laptops and your work computers and so on, so forth. So, you can have it up to 15 different devices for that one user, which basically is powerful because you can be signed on in multiple different devices at the same time. And so, if you just need to, you know, access something on the phone, if you’re, you know, driving somewhere or, you know, to pick up the kids or go get groceries or whatever, or you can be on your laptop when you’re sitting at home working remotely, or working from the office, or whatever the environment is, it allows you to be able to be flexible in that environment, and basically still be able to work. Now, the only downside to this really is, you’re probably gonna be working, you know, 24 hours in a day. But other than that, if you can have some good control then this is the license for you.

Now, the third category that was created really was the Business Premium now. This is the most confusing because it used to be called…well, it didn’t used to be called much, but it was Microsoft 365 Business Premium, which in another license was Office 365 Business Premium, but, you know, now there is no such thing as Office 365 Business Premium, there is only Microsoft 365 Business Premium. And I didn’t share the price for this Business Standard. For those who are curious, this is $12.50, and CAD16 per user per month, that’s the Business Standard one. Now, the Business Premium, the Microsoft 365 Business Premium, this actually has a lot more functionality, and even from the Business Standard. So, it still has everything that the Business Standard has, except now you’ve seen all these really new ID icons here.

And those icons really, you know, this one represents Intune. So, you now have the ability to remotely wipe all company data from devices that the employee was using that might have been lost or stolen, for example. So, you can selectively wipe the content that you want to wipe out using Intune. And, of course, there’s, you know, depending on the security policies that you set up to protect your business and all the data that’s there, you can do a wipe those devices, you know, whether it’s iOS, or Android, or PCs, or anything like that. So, you basically get this mobile device management capability from Intune included in this license that allows you to do that. Now, some people wonder, hey, what about if that person, you know, let’s say that person no longer works for the company, you wanna erase all the company details? Would that also erase their, you know, personal photos or something like that? No, it wouldn’t, because you’ve got all these security policies that are set up so it will only erase the corporate information from that, right?

You also get Defender which is that next icon there. So Defender, Windows Defender basically is gonna give you protection against, you know, threats like email attachments or links, right? So, how many times do we see someone opening up a link that has, you know, some threats or things like that says, hey, you know, I’m setting and so on so forth and, you know, Prince of Africa will be emailing you for all these gold coins that he’s collected and wants to share with you, right, you get all those all the time. Now, the risk here is that users, sometimes accidentally or purposefully or, you know, unintentionally will click on those links, and now your business is, you know, up for ransomware or other threats like that. So, this allows you to have a defense mechanism against all of those malware attempts, with this idea of being in Microsoft 365. And so, there is, of course, this malware protection on there and helps you keep all your…you know, they’re all Windows 10 upgraded devices, safe from any viruses or malicious attacks or something like that as well.

You also do get access to now Azure Information Protection, which basically, is great to restrict, you know, anyone from copying or saving the data for the company. So, you can have, you know, for example, there might be authorized users that have data to that, but then you can also have people that are unauthorized, that shouldn’t have access to that information, or shouldn’t be able to save, or download, or move that information across. So, you get, you know, those protection from those devices while using the information protection from Azure. The next up here is basically you get the conditional access, right? So, you would have access to then grant people not to forward any information, or you can set up information rights management and things like that, again, more about how information is dealt and governed. Those policies can be managed using this license.

And last but not least, and there’s lots more included here, and we can definitely chat more around this if you feel this is something that’s great for your organization, is you get the virtual desktop as well for Windows. And in this case, you obviously not only get the support that’s included, the 99.9% uptime guarantee and everything, but you get the different sessions that are included for how you can set up Remote Desktop Services for environments. And, of course, in many ways, simplify those licenses and then lower your costs for them as well. So, that’s the Microsoft 365 Business Premium license.

Now, compare that to now the Office cloud-based thing, this is really the difference, right? So Office 365 really includes Outlook, Word, Excel, PowerPoint, etc. Whereas now Microsoft 365 has got all those components, as well as the device management skills, the capabilities, the security, and some of the other services that we talked about included upgrades and things like that. So, that’s the distinction between them. Now, some of the licenses that did not change in Office that people still think have changed, is the enterprise-level licenses. So, for example, the E1, E3, and E5. Now, there are differences, of course, there is Microsoft 365 Enterprise licenses like I mentioned, and the Office 365 Enterprise licenses. And I’m gonna try to do that, you know, at a high level here for you.

So, the enterprise E1 is an Office 365 license. Again, anything more than 300 users, you have to get these Enterprise licenses. So, if you’re a business that’s got 301 users, you’re going on to Enterprise and this is the lowest tier of those enterprises, the lightest version of those plans. And so, basically, you get these web versions similar to basic and that your Outlook, and Word, and Excel, and PowerPoint, all those are web-based. So, you have to go to an internet browser to do it, unlike the other ones that we’ll talk about, which are like the E3 and E5, right? Now, this would still give you the cross-platform functionality, and so on and so forth. But really, it’s the most basic tier for Enterprise, there’s nothing additional to this.

The next one up is the Office 365 E3. Now, this is where you can now have the downloadable applications as well. So, you can compare this one, you know, to an extent with some of the apps and services to a Business Standard license for Microsoft 365. However, there’s a lot more security and functionality components in here as well as now if you wanted to have a phone system where you can have a Microsoft Teams meeting, and someone can dial in or you can dial out with actual phone number for your local area, there’s a phone system that you can purchase, but this is the minimum. So, if you wanted a phone number, this is the minimum license that you have to get.

And again, if you’re looking to get a phone system and replace your, you know, Cisco phones or whatever phones you guys have for hardware, you don’t actually need a hardware. You can actually do this on a laptop or your mobile phone and then have another number associated to it. So, this is really where that happens. So, you can actually, you know, do that cross-platform install as well. You also get, you know, added you get the 1 terabyte by default for storage, but you can also upgrade and increase the storage for one drive to 5 and even 25 terabytes if needed. So, you know, the storage restrictions really are limited here as well.

You also get access to data loss prevention. So, there’s DLP policies that you can create in this license that you can’t do in other ones as well. And, of course, the cost justifies that as well. And this new icon that you might be seeing is Microsoft Stream. So, you can, you know, use this as a video, if you’re recording, let’s say, your meetings and things like that, it’ll actually record through Stream and store it there as well.

Now, how is this different than… So this is the Office 365 Enterprise, the next one is the Enterprise 365 E3 license, okay? Now, this Enterprise one includes Intune again, right? So, you still have that, you know, company own data, bring your own device thing that you can, you know, wipe out devices, right? And so, this brings in Intune to this whole conversation, as well as you get the Windows 10 upgrade, right, which is what we talked about as part of Microsoft 365 solutions for Enterprise. And you get a couple of other things. You get identity access for a premium P1 Active Directory license. You might have heard about this new security functionality and have multi-factor authentication and things like that around Windows Hello, and getting direct access so you can have one password that logs into all of the accounts that you have. And, you know, you can have your face ID and all of those things involved, right? So you get that component included, as well as some security management components.

So, you get the secure score so you’re able to, you know, check your security, you know, and see how secure your environment is. And also get some Microsoft recommendations as to where you can be more secure. As well as some…that compliance center or Microsoft Security and Compliance Center where you can actually access that detail as well and upgrade your security. So, a lot more security, a lot more device management capabilities. And, of course, your identity access capabilities as well that you don’t get in Office 365 E3.

The last few here are your Enterprise E5, this is office 365 E5, these still exist. This one, this includes Power BI, and of course, more security. So, as you move up here, you can see that organizations that might have, you know, standards that they have to follow compliance standards, things like that. The higher you go up here, the more the security you get. And of course, if you have a low life like a license that is, you know, not as advanced, you can still add on certain types of securities if you need to and there’s, you know, per unit cost to that as well.

So, this one here, you’ve got, you know, advanced security information protection here, you’ve got some analytics tools like MyAnalytics. You’ve got, you know, Power BI for dashboarding capabilities, that’s all included in this license, you don’t have to pay anything extra to get it and the phone system is included. So, now, unlike E3 where you have to purchase a phone system, you don’t have to purchase a phone system. The only thing you really have to purchase now would be the calling plans, which give you basically a local number to call. And everything else kind of stays the same. So, you still get everything from E3 but, you know, some more voice capabilities and advanced security and analytics.

Now, how is this different from Enterprise E5 for Microsoft 365? It’s vastly different. There’s a lot more component, like Microsoft 365 E5 is like, this is what you wanna get if you don’t wanna worry about anything in life, right? And this is, of course, figurative, there’s always gonna be problems in life. But, you know, you get all the features that you get in Office 365 E5. But now you have a whole bunch of things around compliance, and legal holes, and data loss prevention, and other security around, you know, Cloud App securities that you can get. So, there’s a whole bunch of more components that are involved in Microsoft 365 E5. So, you still get Power BI, you still get phone system and audio system using, you know, Microsoft Teams. You get instead of the P1 now the P2.

And I can tell you the difference of this, maybe perhaps in another call. You get all of the components for Cloud App Security, which by the way is there’s a lot more here. And if I go through this, it might be another webinar on its own. As well as you get, you know, customer keys, you know, self-service encryption with customer keys, you get advanced governance for data, right? You get different access management tools that you can now access. You know, Defenders, there’s different types of Defender for Microsoft 365, then there’s Defender Endpoint, Defender for Office, and Defender for identity, all of those components are included in this license as well.

So, at a high level, you know, this is the difference between Office 365 and Microsoft 365 and all the components that are included in it. I really, really hope that you found value and then we’re able to distinguish now between the two. I might have also obviously confused you a little bit more but that’s why I have this page where you can now contact me directly and be able to, you know, get some more information resources. We could, you know, help you build, you know, roadmaps to what would work best, advise you on which licenses are most appropriate based on your requirements, and so on and so forth.

So, you know, with that I conclude and thank you for joining our session today. If there are any immediate questions, I know we’re kind of short on time, we can ask them right away or shoot me an email, call me directly and reach out and we can answer, you know, your questions and share up there as well. Thank you.

Melissa: Thanks, Ziad. There’s no questions right now, but that’s okay. We will be sending out a recording to everybody and yeah, they can email us or email us at Encore for any more information. So, thanks, have a good afternoon, everyone.

Ziad: Cheers. Bye, everyone, guys.