This has been a very common 'bait and switch' tactic from Microsoft over the years. In recent years we've watched O365 'benefits' for non-profits / charitable organisations be targeted and reduced several times while competitors offerings have remained the same or increased. I could understand this if quality was improving over time but we haven't found that to be the case either. Microsoft's cloud offerings have been plagued by outages and extended periods of unavailability across the O365, exchange and sharepoint online servers. Last year we measured at O365 availability at an embarrassingly poor 78% while the number of times Microsoft acknowledged problems on their service status page was less than 1/20th of the number of times an outage occurred. What's more - it's not just us, I've heard from many small to medium businesses that experience the same poor performance, it seems for every one person that says 'oh we never have problems...' I find 5 people that are dissatisfied or worse - have already left for an alternative or on-premises product. Related note: It's scary how often we notice problems that occurred internally within Microsoft's hosted environment - just start looking at the full email headers of emails from Microsoft's outlook / O365 domains and you'll notice a disturbingly large number that have spent time bouncing around their internal mail servers due to poorly configured / managed DNS and mail relays.
Can you provide some specific examples of reduced benefits for non-profits? I have been an IT admin at a non-profit for three years and found O365's introduction of Enterprise level non-profit plans has been a huge money saver for us.
I do agree that their availability has been less than stellar. We have lots of odd issues with Exchange and SharePoint can be a real damn pain at times.
I can't remember the exact number but we used to get something like 300 licenses, then they reduced it to 200, then earlier this year they reduced it to 100. I believe too that a single user can use more than one license depending on their account type. We spend more time dealing with the issues with O365 both on the licensing and stability front than we did with our own hosted exchange which is saying something since that wasn't very well managed TBQH.
Ahh, interesting. I'm guessing you are using the Business Essentials or Business Premium licenses? Microsoft's website[1] does still say 300 users. We actually use the E3 package at the discounted rate so we have unlimited (for now anyway!).
Microsoft is definately flexing it’s muscle on “tenants”. They are very aggressive upon renewals now, and even large early adopter tenants who got price concessions are now getting hit with big price escalations. Microsoft wants MSRP pricing.
You need to remember that any “XaaS” arrangement is a services agreement, you are a tenant. Just as you must be prepared to not have a long term affiliation with your apartment, you need to be prepared to split when the landlord gets obnoxious. You have no perpetual rights, and need to plan accordingly.