Office 365 Business Essentials

Do your best work from anywhere with always-up-to-date Office tools and collaboration services.

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monthly commitment

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Free trial with Office 365 Business Premium

Simplify how you work together

Store, sync, and share your files online so they’re always up to date. Plus, you can edit documents with others in real time.

Easy setup and management

With step-by-step guidance, you can set up users easily and start using the services fast. And Office 365 takes care of IT for you.

Office 365 Business Essentials includes:

Online services

Use business-class email through a rich and familiar Outlook experience you can access from your desktop or from a web browser using Outlook Web App. Get a 50 GB mailbox per user and send attachments up to 150 MB. Learn more

File storage and sharing

OneDrive for Business provides 1 TB of storage for each user for virtually anywhere access to their documents. Share files with others inside and outside your organization, control who can see and edit each file, and easily sync files with PCs/Macs and devices.

Online conferencing

Host online meetings with audio and video using one-click screen sharing and HD video conferencing. Learn more

Connect with other Skype for Business users via instant message, voice calls, and video calls, and let people know your availability with your online status. Share presence, IM, and audio calling with Skype users. Learn more

Corporate social network

Yammer collaboration software and business applications allow your employees to connect with the right people, share information across teams, and organize around projects so they can go further, faster.

Team sites

Enable easy access and sharing of documents with 1 TB baseline storage plus 500 MB of storage per user. Learn more

Office Online

Create and edit Word, OneNote, PowerPoint, and Excel documents from a browser. Learn more

Work management

Planner makes it easy for your team to create new plans, organize and assign tasks, share files, chat about what you’re working on, and get updates on progress. Learn more

Professional digital storytelling

With Sway, a new Office 365 app, you can easily create engaging, interactive web-based reports, presentations, newsletters, trainings and more—right from your phone, tablet, or browser. Sways are easy to share and look great on any screen. Learn more

Search and discovery

Stay in the know. Search and discover content across Office 365 based on personalized insights. Office Delve is the first experience to be powered by Office Graph, a collection of analyzed signals or insights derived from each user’s behavior and relationships to content, topics, and contacts. Learn more

All Office 365 for business plans include:

Reliability

Get peace of mind knowing your services are available with a guaranteed 99.9% uptime, financially backed service level agreement (SLA).

Security

Cutting-edge security practices with five layers of security and proactive monitoring help keep customer data safe. Learn more

Privacy

Your data is yours. We safeguard it and protect your privacy. Learn more

Administration

Deploy and manage Office 365 across your company, no IT expertise required. You can add and remove user in minutes.

Up to date

No need to pay for version upgrades; updates are included in your subscription. New features are rolled out to Office 365 customers regularly.

Active Directory integration

Manage user credentials and permissions. Single sign-on and synchronization with Active Directory.

Support

Microsoft Support provides telephone and online answers, how-to-resources and connections with other Office 365 customers for setup and quick fixes. Learn more

Office 365 customer success service

Microsoft FastTrack for Office 365

Microsoft FastTrack for Office 365 is our customer success service designed to help you move to Office 365 smoothly and with confidence, and realize business value faster.

Discover what's possible, plan for successful rollouts, and enable new users and capabilities at your own pace. Access best practices, tools, resources, and experts committed to make your experience with Office 365 a success.

FastTrack resources and services are included with Office 365 Business Essentials for customers with at least 50 seats. Learn more

More Details

To see all the features that are included, view the detailed service descriptions.

Frequently asked questions

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How many users does Office 365 Business Essentials support?

Will Office 365 Business Essentials work with my copy of Office?

Office 365 Business Essentials works best with the latest version of Office, Office 2013, and Office 2011 for Mac. Previous versions of Office, such as Office 2010 and Office 2007, may work with Office 365 with reduced functionality. You do not need a desktop version of Office to use Office 365 Business Essentials. However, you will receive a much richer experience and be able to work offline if you do connect a desktop version of Office to the Office 365 services.

What forms of payment can I use?

What payment options are available? Can I pay monthly or annually?

You can choose monthly commitment payment or annual commitment payment for Office 365 Business Essentials.

Monthly commitment payment: You pay month by month, and you can cancel at any time.
Annual commitment payment: You sign up for a one-year subscription, but you can choose to pay month to month or pay for the entire year at the time you sign up. There is a discount for using this payment option.

Can I cancel my subscription at any time?

You can cancel your subscription at any time. Office 365 Business Essentials subscriptions are available for monthly commitment payment or annual commitment payment. For monthly commitment subscriptions, there is no penalty for canceling your contract at any time. Annual commitment subscriptions that are paid month to month may incur some penalties if canceled early. Annual commitment subscriptions that are paid up front do not receive a refund if canceled prior to the full contract period. Read the complete Microsoft Online Subscription Agreement.

What happens to my data if I cancel my subscription?

Your data is yours. If you decide to cancel your Office 365 subscription, you can download your data—for example, your email and documents on team sites—and save it to another location. You should save your data before you cancel. After you cancel your subscription, data associated with your Office 365 account will be available to your administrator(s) in a limited function account for 90 days.

Can I switch to other Office 365 plans?

Yes. If you need to upgrade, you can transition your account to a different plan. For example, you can upgrade from an Office 365 Business plan to an Office 365 Enterprise plan.

In most cases, you can use the Switch plans wizard in your Admin center to upgrade your plan. If your subscription has more than 300 users or if you used a prepaid card to purchase your plan, the Switch plans wizard is not available. Plans that are not eligible for the Switch plans wizard can be upgraded manually. Learn more about upgrading Office 365 plans.

NOTE: When you upgrade your account, your domain name is transferred to your new account, whether you brought your own domain name to the Office 365 account or you set up a domain name with Office 365.

Can I mix and match different Office 365 plans?

Yes, you can mix and match Office 365 plans. Please note that there are some license limitations at the plan level. The Office 365 Business, Business Essentials, and Business Premium plans each have a limit of 300 users, while the Enterprise plans are for an unlimited number of users. For example, you can purchase 300 Business Premium seats, 300 Business Essentials seats, and 500 Enterprise E3 seats on a single tenant.

What if I already own a domain name?

I will need extra help setting up Office 365. Who can help?

Microsoft experts are trained IT and development companies that can help you move to Office 365 or develop custom solutions for your business. You can find a listing of all of our Microsoft experts in Microsoft Pinpoint.

What is the cloud?

“The cloud” is a friendly way of describing web-based computing services that are hosted outside of your organization. When you use cloud-based services, your IT infrastructure resides off your property (off-premises), and is maintained by a third party (hosted), instead of residing on a server at your home or business (on-premises) that you maintain. With Office 365, for example, information storage, computation, and software are located and managed remotely on servers owned by Microsoft. Many services you use every day are a part of the cloud—everything from web-based email to mobile banking and online photo storage. Because this infrastructure is located online or “in the cloud,” you can access it virtually anywhere, from a desktop, PC or Mac, laptop, tablet, smartphone, or other device with an Internet connection.

What is Microsoft FastTrack?

Microsoft FastTrack for Office 365 is the customer success service that helps you move to Office 365, smoothly and with confidence, and deliver business value faster.

The FastTrack Center is a team of hundreds of engineers around the globe, committed to providing IT professionals and partners with a successful Office 365 experience.

Our FastTrack Engineers will provide you with remote and personalized assistance to help you prepare your technical environment and ensure a smooth onboarding and migration experience.

The FastTrack Center will contact eligible customers within 30 days of purchasing Office 365. FastTrack resources and services are included in Office 365 for customers with at least 50 seats of Office 365 Business and Enterprise plans, as well as paid Government, Kiosk, and Nonprofit plans.

Learn more in the service description and FastTrack FAQ.

What happened to the Office 365 Small Business plan?

Office 365 Small Business has been renamed Office 365 Business Essentials. Office 365 Business Essentials includes all the features of the Office 365 Small Business plan, plus additions and improvements. For example, Active Directory has been added to Office 365 Business Essentials and the maximum number of users has been increased from 25 to 300.

See all frequently asked questions

Office 365 Business Essentials

Get work done anywhere

Simplify how you work together

Easy setup and management