Microsoft 365
Microsoft 365 is a product family of productivity software, collaboration and cloud-based services owned by Microsoft. It encompasses online services such as Outlook.com, OneDrive, Microsoft Teams, programs formerly marketed under the name Microsoft Office, and enterprise products and services associated with these products such as Exchange Server, SharePoint, and Viva Engage. Microsoft 365 also covers subscription plans encompassing these products, including those that include subscription-based licenses to desktop and mobile software, and hosted email and intranet services.
The branding Office 365 was introduced in 2010 to refer to a subscription-based software as a service platform for the corporate market, including hosted services such as Exchange, SharePoint, and Lync Server, and Office on the web. Some plans also included licenses for the Microsoft Office 2010 software. Upon the release of Office 2013, Microsoft began to promote the service as the primary distribution model for the Microsoft Office suite, adding consumer-focused plans integrating with services such as OneDrive and Skype, and emphasizing ongoing feature updates.
In July 2017, Microsoft introduced a second brand of subscription services for the enterprise market known as Microsoft 365, combining Office 365 with Windows 10 Enterprise volume licenses and other cloud-based security and device management products. On April 21, 2020, Office 365 was changing its name to Microsoft 365 to emphasize the service's current inclusion of products and services beyond the core Microsoft Office software family. Most products that were called Office 365 were renamed as Microsoft 365 on the same day.
In October 2022, Microsoft announced that it would discontinue the "Microsoft Office" brand by January 2023, with most of its products and online productivity services being marketed primarily under the "Microsoft 365" brand. However, Microsoft continues to sell perpetually-licensed office suites under the "Microsoft Office" brand.
As of April 2025, the Microsoft 365 app is now called Microsoft 365 Copilot.
History
As Office 365
Microsoft first announced Office 365 in October 19, 2010, beginning with a private beta with various organizations, leading into a public beta in April 18, 2011, and reaching general availability on June 28, 2011, with a launch aimed originally at corporate users. Facing growing competition from Google's similar service Google Workspace, Microsoft designed the Office 365 platform to "bring together" its existing online services into "an always-up-to-date cloud service" incorporating Exchange Server, SharePoint, and Lync. Plans were initially launched for small business and enterprises; the small business plan offered Exchange e-mail, SharePoint Online, Lync Online, web hosting via SharePoint, and the Web App with the enterprise plan also adding per-user licenses for the Office 2010 Professional Plus software and 24/7 phone support. Following the official launch of the service, Business Productivity Online Suite customers were given 12 months to migrate from BPOS to the Office 365 platform.With the release of Office 2013, an updated version of the Office 365 platform was launched on February 27, 2013, expanding Office 365 to include new plans aimed at different types of businesses, along with new plans aimed at general consumers, including benefits tailored towards Microsoft consumer services such as OneDrive. The server components were updated to their respective 2013 versions, and Microsoft expanded the Office 365 service with new plans, such as Small Business Premium, Midsize Premium, and Pro Plus. A new Office 365 Home Premium plan aimed at home users offers access to the Office 2013 suite for up to five computers, along with expanded OneDrive storage and 60 minutes of Skype calls monthly. The plan is aimed at mainstream consumers, especially those who want to install Office on multiple computers. A University plan was introduced, targeted at post-secondary students. With these new offerings, Microsoft began to offer prepaid Office 365 subscriptions through retail outlets alongside the normal, perpetually licensed editions of Office 2013.
On March 19, 2013, Microsoft detailed its plans to provide integration with the enterprise social networking platform Yammer for Office 365, such as the ability to use a single sign-on between the two services, shared feeds and document aggregation, and the ability to entirely replace the SharePoint news feed and social functionality with Yammer. The ability to provide a link to a Yammer network from an Office 365 portal was introduced in June 2013, with heavier integration to be introduced in July 2013.
On July 8, 2013, Microsoft unveiled Power BI, a suite of business intelligence and self-serve data mining tools for Office 365, to be released later in the year. Power BI is primarily incorporated into Excel, allowing users to use the Power Query tool to create spreadsheets and graphs using public and private data, and also perform geovisualization with Bing Maps data using the Power Map tool. Users will also be able to access and publish reports, and perform natural language queries on data. As a limited-time offer for certain markets, Microsoft also offered a free one-year Xbox Live Gold subscription with any purchase of an Office 365 Home Premium or University subscription, until September 28, 2013.
From April 15, 2014, Microsoft renamed the "Home Premium" plan to "Home,” and added a new "Personal" plan for single users.
In June 2014, the amount of OneDrive storage offered to Office 365 subscribers was increased to 1 terabyte from 20 GB. On October 27, 2014, Microsoft announced "unlimited" OneDrive storage for Office 365 subscribers. However, due to abuse and a general reduction in storage options implemented by Microsoft, the 1 TB cap was reinstated in November 2015.
In June 2016, Microsoft made Planner available for general release. It is considered to be a competitor to Trello and to other agile team collaboration cloud services.
In April 2017, Microsoft announced that with the ending of mainstream support for Office 2016 on October 13, 2020, access to OneDrive for Business and Office 365-hosted servers for Skype for Business will become unavailable to those who are not using Office 365 ProPlus or Office perpetual in mainstream support. In July 2019, Microsoft announced that the hosted Skype for Business Online service would be discontinued on July 31, 2021, with users being redirected to the Microsoft Teams collaboration platform as its replacement. Since September 2019, Skype for Business Online is no longer offered to new subscribers.
In October 2017, the existing Outlook.com Premium service was discontinued and folded exclusively into Office 365, with all Personal and Family subscribers subsequently being upgraded to 50 GB of storage.
As Microsoft 365
For businesses
The "Microsoft 365" brand was first introduced at Microsoft Inspire in July 2017 as an enterprise subscription product, succeeding the "Secure Productive Enterprise" services released in 2016, and combining Windows 10 Enterprise with Office 365 Business Premium, and the Enterprise Mobility + Security suite including Advanced Threat Analytics, Azure Active Directory, Azure Information Protection, Cloud App Security and Microsoft Intune. Microsoft 365 is sold via Microsoft and its cloud services reseller network.Consumer launch
On March 30, 2020, Microsoft announced that the consumer plans of Office 365 would be rebranded as "Microsoft 365" on April 21, 2020, succeeding existing consumer plans of Office 365.It is a superset of the existing Office 365 products and benefits, positioned towards "life", productivity, and families, including the Microsoft Office suite, 1 TB of additional OneDrive storage and access to OneDrive Personal Vault, and 60 minutes of Skype calls per month. Under the brand, Microsoft will also add access to its collaboration platform Teams, and a premium tier of Microsoft Family Safety. Microsoft also announced plans to offer trial offers of third-party services for Microsoft 365 subscribers, with companies such as Adobe, Blinkist, CreativeLive, Experian, and Headspace having partnered. Microsoft 365 Personal and Family succeeded the Office 365 Personal and Home subscriptions, with no change in pricing.
Office 365 for small- and medium-sized businesses was also renamed Microsoft 365, with Office 365 Business and ProPlus becoming "Microsoft 365 Apps for business" and "Microsoft 365 Apps for enterprise", Office 365 Business Essentials becoming "Microsoft 365 Business Basic", and Office 365 Business Premium becoming "Microsoft 365 Business Standard". The Office 365 brand remains in use for its enterprise, education, healthcare, and governmental plans. Microsoft stated that "over the last several years, our cloud productivity offering has grown well beyond what people traditionally think of as 'Office'", citing examples such as Forms, Planner, Stream, and Teams.
On October 13, 2022, Microsoft announced that it would be phasing out the Microsoft Office brand, in favor of branding all products under the Microsoft 365 name. This change took effect on Office.com in November 2022, followed by the Office mobile apps in January 2023. The Microsoft Office brand will still be used for legacy products, including subscription products still carrying the "Office 365" name since the previous Microsoft 365 rebranding, and the "on-premises"/perpetually licensed Microsoft Office 2021.
In November 2024, Microsoft expanded the use of Copilot in Microsoft 365 apps to Microsoft 365 Personal and Home subscribers in Asia-Pacific markets, previously exclusive to Microsoft's Copilot Pro subscription. Microsoft subsequently increased the price of its consumer subscriptions to accommodate the addition of Copilot features. In December 2024, Microsoft announced that the Microsoft 365 app would be rebranded as the Microsoft 365 Copilot App in an effort to highlight the integration of Copilot features for Microsoft 365 Personal and Home subscriptions. The logo was rebranded to the Copilot logo with an "M365" tag.
In March 2025, Microsoft announced that it would bring Copilot for OneDrive to Microsoft 365 Personal and Home subscriptions. Copilot for OneDrive allows consumers to use Copilot to interact with their files stored in OneDrive.