Office 365 plan comparison – Enterprise and Kiosk subscriptions (E1, E2, E3, E4, K1, K2)

Office 365 plan comparison – Enterprise and Kiosk subscriptions (E1, E2, E3, E4, K1, K2)

By: mike|March 13, 2012No Comments
Microsoft Office 365 Plans Compared

There is a lot of high level information about what features are included with each Office 365 plan. However, the details for the Office 365 plans are scattered among numerous Microsoft documents that aren’t easily found, yet alone understood. Here I’ve attempted to describe in detail, the differences between the Office 365 Kiosk and Enterprise plans. This includes the Office 365 E1, E2, E3, and E4 enterprise plans and the Office 365 K1 and K2 kiosk worker plans.

In addition, the Sharepoint Online component can be accessed by external users who can collaborate on documents and projects within Office 365 Sharepoint sites. These access licenses are called Partner Access License (PAL) and each Office 365 installation is granted 50 Partner Access Licenses by default. Currently Microsoft doesn’t enforce this limit and allows up to 1000 external users per Office 365 installation.

This article doesn’t address the Office 365 P1 plan. This plan is targeted at professionals and small businesses and is roughly equivalent to the Enterprise E3 plan, however, there are many differences within each service. These are addressed in a separate article comparing the Office 365 P1, E1 and E3 plans.

This article covers the three major services included with Office 365:

Office 365 Enterprise and Kiosk plans – Sharepoint Online – (E1, E2, E3, E4, K1, K2 Plans)
Office 365 Enterprise and Kiosk plans – Exchange Online – (E1, E2, E3, E4, K1, K2 Plans)
Office 365 Enterprise and Kiosk plans – Lync Online – (E1, E2, E3, E4, K1, K2 Plans)
Note: Microsoft lowered pricing on their enterprise plans on March 14th, 2012. Those changes are:

 

Office 365 New Pricing – Office 365 Plans E1, E2, E3, E4, K1, and K2
SKU Previous Cost New Cost Reduction
Office 365 K2 $10.00 $8.00 20%
Office 365 E1 $10.00 $8.00 20%
Office 365 E2 $16.00 $14.00 13%
Office 365 E3 $24.00 $20.00 17%
Office 365 E4 $27.00 $22.00 19%
SharePoint Storage (GB) $2.50 $0.20 92%
Exchange Advanced Archiving $3.50 $3.00 14%
Notes:
This pricing applies to new customers only. Customers that are under contract will still pay the same rate that their contract states. Rates will be updated when the contract is renewed.
If a current customers purchases additional seats, the new seats will be subject to the new pricing.

These Office 365 subscription plans are targeted at business of all size that require maximum flexibility in there online e-mail and collaboration service.

Office 365 Sharepoint Online Features for the Enterprise and Kiosk Plans

 

Office 365 Plan Comparison – Office 365 Plans E1, E2, E3, E4, K1, and K2
Sharepoint Online Features
Feature
Office 365 K1 and K2 Plans SharePoint Online Kiosk 1 and Kiosk 2
Office 365 E1 and E2 Plans SharePoint Online 1
Office 365 E3 and E4 Plans SharePoint Online 2
Office 365 Partner Access License (PAL)
(external partners)
Can access all team sites by default?
Yes
Yes
Yes
No1
My Site
No
Yes
Yes
No
Enterprise Features (Access, Business Connectivity Services (BCS), InfoPath Forms, Excel and Visio Services)
Yes3
No
Yes2
Yes2
Office Web Apps
K1 – View only
K2 – View and edit
E1 – View only
E2 – View and edit
View and edit
View only
Adds storage to the company’s overall pooled quota?
No
Yes. 500MB per user subscription license
Yes. 500MB per user subscription license
No
Can be an administrator of tenant, site or site collection?
No
Yes
Yes
No
1 – External partners can only access the sites they have been invited to by delegated site collection owners. 2 – Can view and upload Visio diagrams, view and build external lists, build and visit Access-based webpages, build and view embedded Excel graphs and create/publish, fill in and submit InfoPath forms. 3 – Kiosk workers have read-only rights except they can edit web-based and InfoPath Forms only.

Office 365 Partner Access License (PAL)

The Office 365 Partner Access License grants access to features like another Office 365 Plan. Below is an excerpt from the “Microsoft SharePoint Online for Enterprises Service Description”:

External sharing: The external sharing capabilities in SharePoint Online enable a company to simply invite external users in to view, share, and collaborate on their sites. Once a SharePoint Online Administrator enables external sharing, a site collection administrator can activate external sharing for the site they manage, and then invite external users to collaborate on sites, lists, and document libraries. An external user has access rights to only the site collection they are invited into. Please also note the external user use rights as explained above.

Note
Every Office 365 SharePoint Online customer (at the tenant level, not per subscription) includes 50 Partner Access Licenses (PALs) that can be leveraged for external sharing. Customers are not currently required to obtain additional PALs for external sharing beyond 50 users with a limit of 1000 until the next major update of the Office 365 service at which time Microsoft may choose to make it available as a paid add-on.
Microsoft supports invited external users signing in to the service using a Microsoft Online Services ID.
External sharing also supports Windows Live ID, including @Live.com, @Hotmail.com and @MSN.com user names, plus regional derivations of LiveID user names.
EasiID, the portion of LiveID that allows external users to associate their business email address (ex: user@contoso.com) to the LiveID system, is not supported at this time.

Office 365 Sharepoint Online “Server Resources” quota

From a development perspective SharePoint Online offers a flexible, robust framework for customizing and developing solutions in Office 365. The development features and patterns used to develop for SharePoint Online are a subset of those available in SharePoint 2010 on-premises.

Note
While SharePoint Online offers many opportunities to building customized solutions, the service does not yet support Full Trust Coded (FTC) solutions or what is sometimes referred to as farm-level solutions. The SharePoint Online development patterns and practices are currently targeted at site collection level solutions.
“Server Resources” quota, what are used to determine amount of processing power available to Sandboxed Solutions, is determined by the number of licensed user seats in a company’s tenancy. To calculate server resource quota in Office 365, you can use the following equation: (#seats×200) + 300. For example, in a typical 25 seat license, the available server resources quota would be 5300.
Neither Kiosk 1 (K1) or Kiosk 2 (K2) add to the overall total server resources quota
Companies cannot purchase server resources as a standalone add-on

SharePoint Online key features and specifications

These are common for all Office 365 plans that include Sharepoint Online.

Feature Description
Storage (pooled) 10 gigabytes (GB) base customer storage plus 500 megabytes (MB) per enterprise user
Storage per Kiosk Worker Zero (0). Licensed Kiosk Workers do not bring additional storage allocation.
Storage per external user Zero (0). Licensed external users do not bring additional storage allocation.
Additional storage (per GB per month); no minimum purchase. $2.50USD/GB/month
Site collection storage quotas Up to 100 gigabytes (GB) per site collection
My Site storage allocation (does not count against tenant’s overall storage pool) 500 megabytes (MB) of personal storage per My Site (once provisioned)
*Note: the storage amount on individual’s My Site storage cannot be adjusted.
Site collections (#) per tenant Up to 300 (non-My Site site collections)
Total storage per tenant Up to 5 terabyte (TB) per tenant
File upload limit 250 megabytes (MB) per file
External Users (PALs) 50 PALs are included per tenant. Current “Feature Preview” allows for usage rights of up to 1000 external users without requiring additional PALs. Microsoft reserves the right to charge for additional PALs beyond 50 at the time the next major Office 365 update.
Microsoft Office support Microsoft Access 2010 Microsoft Excel® 2007 and 2010 Microsoft InfoPath® 2010
Outlook 2007 and 2010
Microsoft OneNote 2010
PowerPoint 2007 and 2010 Microsoft SharePoint Designer 2010 Word 2007 and 2010
SharePoint Workspace 2010
Project Professional 2010
Browser support Internet Explorer 7 Internet Explorer 8 Internet Explorer 9 Firefox 3 and higher Safari 3.1.2 on Macintosh OS X 10.5 Chrome
Mobile device support Windows Phone 7.5 codenamed “Mango” or later Windows Mobile® 6.1 or later Nokia S60 3.0 or later
Apple iPhone 3.0 or later
Blackberry 4.2 or later
Android 1.5 or later

Office 365 Exchange Online Features for the Enterprise and Kiosk Plans

There are significant differences between the Office 365 kiosk and enterprise plans for Exchange Online. The Kiosk version has limited connectivity versus the enterprise plans. The primary benefit of the Office 365 E3 and E4 plans for Exchange Online is unlimited storage, the legal hold feature, and voicemail integration.

Office 365 Plan Comparison – Office 365 Plans E1, E2, E3, E4, K1, and K2
Exchange Online Features
Feature
Office 365 K1 and K2 Plans
Exchange Online
Kiosk
Office 365 E1 and E2 Plans
Exchange Online
(Plan 1)
Office 365 E3 and E4 Plans
Exchange Online
(Plan 2)
Office 365 Partner Access License (PAL)
(external partners)
Mailbox size
500 megabytes (MB)
25 gigabytes (GB)*
Unlimited**
Office 365 Partner Access License (PAL) users have not access to Exchange online freatures.
Outlook Web App
(regular and light versions)
Yes
Yes
Yes
POP
Yes
Yes
Yes
IMAP
No
Yes
Yes
Outlook Anywhere (MAPI)
No
Yes
Yes
Microsoft Exchange ActiveSync®
No
Yes
Yes
Exchange Web Services
No***
Yes
Yes
Inbox rules
No
Yes
Yes
Delegate access
No (cannot access other users’ mailboxes, shared mailboxes, or resource mailboxes)
Yes
Yes
Instant messaging interoperability in OWA
No
Yes (requires Lync Online or Microsoft Lync Server 2010)
Yes (requires Lync Online or Microsoft Lync Server 2010)
SMS notifications
No
Yes
Yes
Custom retention policies
Yes
Yes
Yes
Multi-mailbox search
Yes
Yes
Yes
Personal archive
No
Yes
Yes
Voicemail
No
No
Yes
Legal hold
No
No
No
*25 GB of storage apportioned across the user’s primary mailbox and personal archive **25 GB of storage in the user’s primary mailbox, plus unlimited storage in the user’s personal archive. Refer to the personal archive section of this document for further information regarding unlimited storage in the archive ***Direct access to Kiosk user mailboxes via Exchange Web Services is not permitted. However, line of business applications can use Exchange Web Services impersonation to access Kiosk user mailboxes

Office 365 E3 and E4 Plans – Unlimited Personal Archive

In Office 365, a personal archive can only be used to store one user’s messaging data. In the Office 365 E1 and Office 365 E2 plan each user receives 25 gigabytes (GB) of total storage which includes both the user’s primary mailbox and personal archive. This effectively limits the personal archive for an Office 365 E1 and E2 plan user to less than 25 GB.

An Office 365 E3 plan and Office 365 E4 plan user has 25 GB for their primary mailbox, plus unlimited storage in the personal archive. For Office 365 E3 and E4 plan users, the personal archive has a default quota of 100 GB. This is generally large enough for reasonable use, including importing a user’s historical email. In the unlikely event that a user reaches this quota, Office 365 support can increase the quota.

To change the Single Item Recovery period for a mailbox, an administrator must contact Office 365 support. The Office 365 E1 and E2 plans support Single Item Recovery period of up to 30 days. The Office 365 E3 plan and Office 365 E4 plan both support a Single Item Recovery period of any length.

Office 365 Lync Online Features for the Enterprise and Kiosk Plans

This table comparing Office 365 plans for Lync Online is a little overkill because the Kiosk plans don’t include Lync and external users don’t have Lync rights either. On top of that all Office 365 E plans include Lync Online Plan 2.

Feature
Office 365 K1 and K2 Plans
Office 365 E1 and E2 Plans
Lync Online
(Plan 2)
Office 365 E2 and E3 Plans
Lync Online
(Plan 2)
Office 365 Partner Access License (PAL)
(external partners)
Instant messaging (IM) and presence
Office 365 Kiosk K1 and K2 plans have no access to Lync Online features of Office 365.
Yes
Yes
Office 365 Partner Access License (PAL) users have not access to Exchange online freatures.
Lync-to-Lync audio/video calling (1-to-1)
Yes
Yes
Lync federation (IM/presence/audio/video)
Yes
Yes
Click-to-communicate in Office
Yes
Yes
Authenticated attendee in Lync meetings*
Yes
Yes
Microsoft Exchange ActiveSync®
Yes
Yes
Online Meetings
Yes (up to 250 attendees)
Yes (up to 250 attendees)
Initiate ad-hoc and scheduled online meetings
Yes
Yes
Initiate multiparty (3 or more users) Lync audio/video sessions
Yes
Yes
Initiate interactive data sharing (screen/application/whiteboard)
Yes
Yes
Interop with third-party dial-in audio conferencing services
Yes
Yes
*Unauthenticated attendees who join scheduled Lync meetings do not require a Lync Online license.

 

References:

The information in this article comparing Office 365 subscription plans was gleaned from the following Microsoft documents:

Office 365 Microsoft Sharepoint Online for Enterprises Service Description (Updated 12/6/2011)
Office 365 Microsoft Exchange Online for Enterprises Service Description (Updated 11/18/2011)
Office 365 Microsoft Lync Online for Enterprises Service Description (Updated 7/29/2011)