Microsoft Office 365 - Getting up to speed with the cloud

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Originally Posted by vikpaw

Some advice please.
Migrated to office 365 and now on exchange plan 1 for students. there are numerous free plans i can subscribe too, can i opt for them all, are some old and defunct. which is better? can't find any decent comparisons for education. Online chat told me to bog off and resellers here are useless!
I can see Exchange plan 1 for students , faculty, staff. Are all these superceded by Office 365 plans A2.?
I can also add "Sharepoint online plan 1" and "office webapps with sharepoint online plan 1". Do i need both, what's the difference.?
Will any of these affect the current setup / users.?

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Compare Office 365 Plans and Pricing for Schools - Office 365

There are licensing plans available (A2 through A4), and these are made up from individual components. For example, A2 includes Exchange Online Plan 2, Lync Online Plan 2, SharePoint Online Plan 1 and the Office Web Apps.

If you assign the whole plan to a user, they get all those services. You can elect to only assign individual parts of the plan (i.e. Exchange only) and the user will only get those services.

The difference between "SharePoint Online Plan 1" and "Office Web Apps with SharePoint Online Plan 1" is in the name. :)

Whether or not changing licences affects the users depends on what data they have in the system - if you remove an Exchange Online licence the user will lose access to their mailbox; similarly if you remove a SharePoint Online licence the user will lose access to SharePoint. If you've been through the upgrade all your users will have come across onto Exchange Online Plan 1 which is just an individual component SKU; you can now "purchase" the A2 plan if you wish and assign it to your users to offer the other services or just leave it as it is.

Cheers James, that helps. it makes sense now that i know the A2 plan envelopes the others. So i can just opt for that. The confusion with sharepoint plans is because on the english site, they are priced difference for with or without office webapps, but on my upgrade page they are the same price. If one has extra features for the same price it's a no brainer, so i assumed there's something else between them.
When i click on learn more on the A plans, rather than give me info, it takes me to a commercial page where it wants me to choose a bigger and higher plan for more money, rather than just tell me what i get in that plan.

It's just a little frustrating and not very clear.

I'm going for A2 free plan for students and the same for staff. That will encompass everything right? Then i'll add exchange online plan for alumni. And i'll have all that i can get for free? That's all i want, all the freebies.