Transitioning from Office 365 E3 to Business Premium

Microsoft 365 Business Premium is a comprehensive, all-in-one productivity suite specifically designed for SMBs. It combines the Microsoft Office applications, cloud services, and security features into a single subscription offering. With Microsoft 365 Business Premium, companies can boost their productivity, collaboration, and data protection, all while streamlining their IT management.

M365 Business Premium offers many additional security features over and above what is included in Office 365 E3, and is cheaper, which makes moving to Business Premium an easy and beneficial change for SMBs with less than 300 users. M365 Business Premium is also one of the SKUs included in the Global Strategic Product Accelerator Incentive meaning that partners with a Solutions Partner Designation are eligible to earn additional rebates. Moving your customers to Business Premium also opens doors to new professional and managed services opportunities, as the customer will already be licensed security services such as Intune, Defender, and Azure AD Premium which gives you the opportunity to sell additional services to your customers to deploy and manage these solutions.  

It's important to note before having any conversations with your customers about this transition, that Office 365 E3 to M365 Business Premium is not an eligible NCE upgrade path. This means that you will need to wait until the end of the subscription term before moving the customer to Business Premium.

Key Differences

The key differentiator between Business Premium and Office 365 E3 is security – Business Premium includes the following security services that are not included in O365 E3:

• Microsoft Entra ID P1 (previously called Azure AD Premium P1) – An identity and access management solution that enables organisations to securely manage their user identities and access to resources. It provides single sign-on (SSO) capabilities, multi-factor authentication (MFA), and self-service password reset (SSPR) features, enhancing security and the user experience.
• Microsoft Intune Plan 1 - A cloud-based mobile device management (MDM) solution designed to help businesses secure and manage their devices and apps. It enables organisations to remotely control access to company data on employees' devices, enforce security policies, and ensure compliance.
• Defender for Office 365 P1 – A comprehensive security solution designed to protect businesses from email-based threats. It offers advanced features like anti-phishing and anti-malware protection, safeguarding against malicious attachments and URLs with real-time threat detection and URL scanning.
• Defender for Business – A endpoint security solution that helps protect organisations from a wide range of cyber threats with advanced threat detection and response capabilities, including antivirus, malware protection, and behaviour-based analytics.

The other key difference between the two licenses is storage. Since Office 365 E3 is an enterprise plan, it includes additional storage with a 100GB mailbox and unlimited OneDrive Storage, whereas Business Premium includes a 50GB mailbox and 1TB OneDrive storage. The additional storage is the only feature an O365 E3 customer would ‘lose’ by moving to Business Premium. While a 50GB mailbox is enough for most users, if a user needs more mailbox storage this can be easily addressed with Exchange Online Archiving, a feature included in Business Premium that provides an archive mailbox linked to the user’s primary mailbox with up to 1.5TB of additional storage space.

To check whether any users have more than 50GB mail or 1TB of OneDrive files, you can use the OneDrive for Business usage report and Mailbox usage report in the Microsoft Admin Center (MAC). By default, user details in the reports are hidden so make sure to enable the setting to show concealed usernames in the reports.

Exchange Online Archiving

Exchange Online Archiving is cloud-based email archiving solution offered by Microsoft. It allows organisations to store and manage their historical email data securely in the cloud, providing additional storage capacity for users' primary mailboxes. When Exchange Online Archiving is enabled for a user a secondary archive mailbox, named “Online archive – <user’s email address>” is created which sits under the user’s primary mailbox in Outlook. The archive mailbox is initially provisioned with 100GB of mailbox storage, which can be increased up to 1.5TB when auto-expanding is enabled.

Exchange Online Archiving can be enabled in the Exchange Online Admin Center (EAC) or by using Exchange Online PowerShell. If you want to bulk-enable archiving for all users, you must use PowerShell.

Here’s what will happen when you enable the archive mailbox:

• By default, emails older than 2 years will be moved to the archive mailbox. This is controlled by the Default MRM Policy that is created by Exchange Online. You can customise the MRM policy if you want to change this behaviour.
• It can take up to 7 days for archive mailbox to be provisioned and the mail to move to the archive mailbox. This is because the process responsible for this (Managed Folder Assistant) runs once every 7 days. Instead of waiting you can force the Managed Folder Assistant process to run with PowerShell.
• By default, the online archive mailbox will have 100GB storage space. If you need more storage space, you can enable auto-expanding archiving, which will automatically increase the mailbox storage space as it reaches the storage quota up until the archive mailbox reaches 1.5TB.

Business Premium vs Office 365 E3 - Feature Comparison