Office 365, as a suite of services, has a number of different “packages” or SKUs that it uses to bundle services together at different price bands so that customers have flexibility over how much they consume of their cloud services. Office 365 broke these into different tracks based on whether you were an enterprise, a small business, home user, education, government and so on.
From this October, 2014, Microsoft is making changes to Office 365 offer names, simplifying the naming conventions used for education, government and non-profits. Read on to find out more…
Changes to Office 365 Offer Names
Below is a summary of the changes. No functionality is impacted, only the names used to describe the SKUs (offers).
| Old Name | New Name |
| Office 365 Education A2 | Office 365 Education E1 |
| Office 365 Education A3 | Office 365 Education E3 |
| Office 365 Education A4 | Office 365 Education E4 |
| Office 365 (Plan E1) for Government | Office 365 Enterprise E1 (Government Pricing) |
| Office 365 (Plan E3) for Government | Office 365 Enterprise E3 (Government Pricing) |
| Office 365 (Plan E4) for Government | Office 365 Enterprise E4 (Government Pricing) |
| Office 365 Government G1 | Office 365 Government E1 |
| Office 365 Government G3 | Office 365 Government E3 |
| Office 365 Government G4 | Office 365 Government E4 |
| Office 365 Enterprise E1 for Nonprofits | Office 365 Nonprofit E1 |
| Office 365 Enterprise E3 for Nonprofits | Office 365 Nonprofit E3 |
Beyond seeing the new names in places like the admin portal, there are no other changes – you don’t need to do anything to update your users, or change the way they’re currently licenced. Everything will carry on as normal. Importantly, pricing stays the same; i.e. Office 365 Education A2 which is $0 today will remain so after it is renamed to Office 365 Education E1.
This change is not due to land until October 2014, and you probably won’t even notice until you come to acquire more licences or re-assign some to new students, for example.
Lastly, if it’s not in the table above, it’s not changing.
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