If you still call it Office 365, you are not behind. Most of the businesses we speak to do, and the name on their invoice often says something different again. Here is what changed, what each plan actually gives you, and what support a business genuinely needs.
What changed
In 2020 Microsoft moved most of its Office 365 plans for businesses to the Microsoft 365 name. The plan many small businesses were on became Microsoft 365 Business Standard, and the basic web based plan became Microsoft 365 Business Basic. Some larger enterprise plans still carry the Office 365 name, which is part of why it is so confusing.
What did not change is the stuff you use every day. Outlook and your email, Word, Excel, PowerPoint, Teams, SharePoint and OneDrive are all still there. If someone offers you “Office 365 support” or “Microsoft 365 support”, they mean the same thing.
Which plan does what
For most businesses it comes down to three plans:
- Business Basic. Email, Teams, SharePoint and OneDrive, with Word, Excel and PowerPoint in a browser and on phones, but not installed on your computers.
- Business Standard. Everything in Basic, plus the full desktop versions of Word, Excel, Outlook and PowerPoint. This is where most offices end up.
- Business Premium. Everything in Standard, plus the security tools that matter as soon as you have more than a couple of staff: Intune to manage laptops and phones, conditional access to control who can sign in from where, and stronger protection against phishing.
A mix is normal. Staff who only need email can sit on Basic while the office team has Standard or Premium. The most common waste we find is the opposite: everyone on the most expensive plan, and licences still being paid for people who left last year.
The settings that matter more than the plan
Whichever plan you are on, three things make the biggest difference to how safe your business is:
- Multi factor authentication for everyone. A password on its own is no longer enough. A second step, usually a tap on a phone, stops most account takeovers before they start.
- SPF, DKIM and DMARC on your domain. Three records that let other mail servers check your emails really came from you. Without them your invoices are more likely to land in spam, and anyone can send email pretending to be you.
- Leavers removed on the day they leave. Old accounts with working passwords are one of the easiest ways into a business.
In most of the setups we look at, at least one of these is missing.
What support a business actually needs
IT support is usually split into two levels:
- Tier 1 is the everyday: password resets, Outlook problems, setting up new starters and removing leavers, a new phone that needs the authenticator app.
- Tier 2 goes deeper: permissions on SharePoint and Teams, accounts and sign in rules, mail that is not arriving, a laptop that will not enrol, a suspicious sign in that needs looking into.
A business without its own IT person needs someone it can call for both, who knows how its Microsoft 365 is set up. What it usually does not need is a big contract covering printers, networks and hardware it does not have.
What we do
We give full tier 1 and tier 2 support for Microsoft 365, and Office 365 by any other name, for businesses in Wolverhampton and across the West Midlands. The monthly contract is a flat fee set by how many people we support: £75 a month for up to 5 users, £135 for 6 to 10, £225 for 11 to 20 and £300 for 21 to 30. Set ups, migrations and security tidy ups are quoted as one off projects.
If you are not sure which plan you are on, or whether the settings above are switched on, that is the first thing we check. Get in touch and we will tell you plainly what you have.