The new Office 365 suite line-up

By Ron Grattopp ronaldg-001_thumb2_thumb_thumb1_thum….If you’ve been reading the TS2 blog at all, I’m sure you’re aware that the new Office 365 launched today and that it included one particularly important new offering. My team has already put out a lot of information around the new Office 365 Midsize Business offering which can be sold under the Open License model (as well as via Advisor even though that is not shown in the chart below). But the main reason I’m doing this post is to share this one graphic below – which, IMHO, is a great overview of the new line-up of subscription suite offerings now available. Most of you should be familiar with the Enterprise offerings (although note that going forward E1 and E2 will be combined into a single E1 offering that will include the editable Office Web Apps) as well as the Small Business offering. These are the updated versions of the suites that you have been selling as Office 365 presumably under something called the “Advisor” model (where the transaction is typically done on the Online Services portal and revenue comes in the form of Partner of Record fees). 

But, as you see below, the red outlines highlight 4 new offerings including 2 new offerings for the consumer space (Office 365 University and Home Premium), as well as 2 new offerings in the commercial space (Office 365 Small Business Premium and Midsize Business). So, we have effectively doubled the number of subscription offerings and provided you with even more flexibility to provide a targeted online service solution to your customer, regardless of size or needs. As shown in the chart below, the main differentiator between the Consumer offerings and the Commercial offerings is that the consumer offerings leverage the consumer services Skype and SkyDrive whereas the Commercial offerings leverage the complete Office commercial services backend which is now updated to all the 2013 technologies. The other big thing to notice on this chart is that ALL of the new offerings now include the Office ProPlus (2013) client. Of course, you may need some of the commercial services infrastructure to make use of some of the advanced functionality of the Office ProPlus suite but, nevertheless, all of the new offerings bring Office ProPlus for use on multiple devices to the table. IF you’re unfamiliar with the term FPP (which stands for Full Packaged Product) below, just understand that it basically means it’s a retail model where you buy it much as you would have bought a box of Office in the past (although as above, like Midsize Business, Small Business Premium will available via the Advisor model as well). The difference being that the FPP just includes subscription activation codes and not discs or other media.

So, I really just wanted to take the opportunity of the new Office 365 launch to give you this nice chart of the breadth of new offerings you can now sell to your customers along with some of the key differentiators between them. 

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If you have access to MPN, here’s where you can get more information on the Open and FPP sales models:
Download the Office 365 Open and FPP reseller kit and Get an overview of Office 365 Open and FPP

And here’s today’s press release: https://www.microsoft.com/en-us/news/Press/2013/Feb13/02-27OfficeCommercialGAPR.aspx

Hope this was helpful.
Cheers,
Ron