More than 3.7 million organizations worldwide use Microsoft 365 for productivity apps and collaboration tools. Many users are familiar with these tools, minimizing the learning curve and maximizing adoption. The Microsoft 365 platform is mature, scalable and continuously updated, with a well-established ecosystem of third-party resources.
Organizations adopt Microsoft 365 for a wide variety of reasons. Some seek to take advantage of Microsoft Teams for collaboration and to access applications and data from anywhere. Others may be looking to consolidate redundant services and take advantage of a proven platform for file sharing and storage.
Organizations increasingly rely on Microsoft 365, both to eliminate the need to purchase, install and maintain software and to give remote workers access to essential productivity applications and collaboration tools. More than a million organizations have adopted M365, which has about 240 million active users.
Microsoft 365 licensing has always been complex. It just got more complicated.
On April 1, 2024, Microsoft unbundled Teams from its M365 and Office 365 licenses worldwide. The company had already removed Teams from its subscriptions sold in the European Economic Area (EEA) and Switzerland in response to a European Commission investigation into anticompetitive practices.
Microsoft doesn’t need your charity. The world’s second-largest company has a market capitalization of about $2.5 trillion, and some analysts believe it will soon become the world’s first $5 trillion company. However, if you are among the millions of Microsoft 365 users, you’re probably giving the company more money than you should.
Tick tock. Time is running out on organizations that have not yet upgraded from Office 2013. On April 11, Microsoft is ending support for that version of the popular business productivity suite. Although all applications included in Office 2013 will remain functional after the shutoff date, Microsoft will no longer provide technical support, feature updates or security patches.
The last day of extended support for Microsoft Office 2007 and Outlook 2007 was October 10, 2017. It’s been a great 10-year run, but Office 2007 has reached its end of life. It’s time to move on. Sigh…
Yes, Office 2007 and Outlook 2007 will still function, but the software isn’t supported by Microsoft any longer.
As applications, services and infrastructure have become increasingly available in the cloud, organizations of all sizes have begun to seriously contemplate a “cloud-first” strategy. The idea is to reduce IT costs by utilizing shared resources through the cloud whenever possible.
