Adios Office 365, Hello Microsoft 365! | TechTree.com

Adios Office 365, Hello Microsoft 365!

The company appears to be hell bent on creating a bigger bang for its subscription brand that’s added considerably to its bottom-line growth

 

Microsoft has announced that from April 21, the company would be renaming the Office 365 cloud-based service as Microsoft 365 to which it would be adding more AI and cloud-powered tools to enhance productivity of the users.

“Today, we are delighted to announce that on April 21st, Office 365 will become Microsoft 365, the subscription for your life to help you make the most of your time, connect, and protect the ones you love, and to develop and grow,” says Yusuf Mehdi, corporate vice-president, Modern Life, Search and Devices, Microsoft in a blog post.

The company says there would be no change in the pricing which stays at $7 per month to $70 a year for personal use and $10 per month to $100 a year for the family plan. However, Mehdi says the scope of the service would become broader as it adds a new Family Safety app for tracking screen time and other aspects of one’s digital life.

“An evolution of Office 365, Microsoft 365 builds on the foundation of Office infusing new artificial intelligence (AI), rich content and templates, and cloud-powered experiences to empower you to become a better writer, presenter, designer, manager of your finances, and deepen your connection to the people in your life. These experiences start rolling out today and will reach the over 38 million Office 365 subscribers over the next few months,” he said.

The core features of Microsoft 365 are the same as before: You'll get access to desktop Office apps, a terabyte of OneDrive storage per person and 60 minutes of Skype phone calling every month. That's not too shabby, especially if you're sharing access across your entire family (up to 6 people). Still, it would have been nice to see Microsoft bring back the unlimited storage offering that it announced for Office 365 users in 2014. The company gave up on that perk a year later after some users started abusing it, but it might be more feasible in 2020. At the very least, it's time for Microsoft to move beyond the 1 terabyte storage limit.

As for new capabilities, Microsoft Editor, the company's AI tool for writing help, is expanding across Word and the Outlook web app. You can also use it on Microsoft Edge and Google Chrome with a browser extension. You'll get the basic spelling and grammar help that you're used to, but you can highlight a sentence to get some rewriting suggestions. There's also a new similarity checker that could help you avoid potential plagiarism issues. It'll recognize when your text looks similar to other content and suggest ways to cite that appropriately.

Additionally, PowerPoint's Presenter Coach can also monitor your pitch and suggest speech variations to add some sparkle to your words, and it can even offer up grammar suggestions for better phrasing. PowerPoint Designer is also getting super-charged to help you design better presentations, and you'll get access to over 8,000 images and 175 looping videos from Getty images. You can plug in that media into Word and Excel as well, and those apps are also getting over 200 new templates.

For the most part, this is all a branding change for Microsoft. But it sets the stage for the company to rethink how it's approaching its productivity subscription service. Office will certainly continue to be a large part of Microsoft 365, but it'll be interesting to see where Microsoft goes beyond adding a family safety app.


TAGS: Microsoft 365, Office 365, Office 365 Personal

 
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