Crucial changes to low/no cost Microsoft Education licenses

Microsoft is making crucial changes to their Microsoft Office 365 Education licenses that will increase costs to many schools and colleges.

Office 365 A1 plus – gone!

The Office 365 A1 Plus program for Education will be retired by Microsoft on August 1, 2024.  A1 Plus included Office desktop apps for qualified schools that purchased Office institution-wide for faculty and staff.

Instead, schools will have to either downgrade to the A1 licence (web apps only) or pay for A3 or A5 licences.

Microsoft says the A1 Plus plan is “no longer needed”.  Who doesn’t need it?  Presumably Microsoft.   

Education Storage changes

All education customers with Microsoft 365 or Office 365 will get 100TB of free pooled storage across OneDrive, SharePoint, and Exchange. That’s from the next contract renewal but no earlier than August 1, 2024,

Additional 50GB or 100GB of pooled storage per paid user will be provided for A3 and A5 subscriptions, respectively.

Office 365 A1 users (no-cost subscription) will be limited to a maximum of 100GB of OneDrive storage per user within the school tenant’s 100TB of pooled storage. From February 1, 2024.

See Microsoft’s announcement of these changes.