The Office 365 K-Plan Gets Even Better

The Kiosk worker offering in Office 365 (aka the K-plan) is designed for the user that doesn’t have messaging and collaboration today. It is a low cost way of giving you a common platform for communicating with employees such as 'deskless' workers, shift workers or retail store employees who use shared PCs

The value proposition is already great (prices starting at USD 2 per user per month for the Exchange Online Kiosk Plan) - but new exciting Office 365 changes to the K-plan brings you increased value:

  • Exchange Online Kiosk Plan:
    • We're adding Exchange ActiveSync (EAS) for mobile devices to the Exchange Online Kiosk plan, giving you mobile support beyond the POP capabilities currently supported in the Kiosk sku. With this change, we will enable all smartphones that support EAS, including iPhone, Andriod phones, Nokia phones (Symbian), and Windows phones.
    • We are also doubling email storage in the K plan from 500MB to 1GB
  • Exchange Online Archiving changes
    • Going forward, we will now allow Exchange Online Archiving (EOA) including legal hold and unlimited storage, to be offered as an add-on to any Exchange Online plan, including Kiosk and Exchange Plan 1.

EAS is designed for the synchronization of email, contacts, calendar, tasks and notes from a messaging server to a mobile device, where as POP is limited to e-mail only.

For workers on the road most of their day (e.g. district nurses or home helpers, helping elderly people in their homes) the above changes obvisously will add a lot of increased functionality if they have a smartphone, e.g. being able maintain to an updated schedule in their calenders, set reminders via tasks a.s.o.

See also

  • "Office 365: New Capabilities for Kiosk Workers" - link
  • "Office 365 kiosk users get optional unlimited email, other upgrades" - link