Office 365 subscription conundrum

[eyebeebe]

At home I have a Microsoft Exchange Plan for my private email address and my girlfriend's. AIUI to use Office on a laptop as well as 12.9" iPad Pro I need to buy an Office 365 subscription, but because I have an Exchange plan I have to have a small business Office 365 sub rather than a home user one. I've been doing this for about 3 years.

We are an Apple household and Apple now allow you to manage your own domains/email addresses via iCloud for free. If I don't have an Exchange plan, I can take advantage of my employer's Home User Plan. This should lead to a reasonable annual saving.

So I've cancelled both the Exchange and Office 365 annual subscriptions. The problem is that the Office one ends in March and the Exchange in May. Short of buying standalone Office (which doesn't support iPad anyway or I would have just bought it outright) is there any way I can continue using Office on my Mac and ideally iPad for the two months between the subscriptions ending?

If I can avoid creating a new MS account for the HUP that would be ideal. Other than seeing if I can get by with LibreOffice for a couple of months, but I don't think it is on iPad, I can't think of any other options.

Does anyone have any other suggestions?

[eeLee]

Reading between the lines, I am guessing:
- you want good price. CHF65,- a year good for M365 Family? (toppreise.ch will let you find this)
- you have your own domain? You can bypass the GoDaddy requirement as registrar with 4 DNS entries for your domain (this might help: https://www.swinglish.ch/2022/01/setting-up-person...

That gives you outlook.com (which is hosted Exchange for the plebs) with 5 x 50Gb mailboxes and 5 x 1Tb OneDrive (per family member/account). Plus of course M365 Office (you're missing Visio) and 60 minutes a month on Skype out.

I compare this to HUP subs and it's completely worth it.

[eyebeebe]

eeLee said:

Reading between the lines, I am guessing:
- you want good price. CHF65,- a year good for M365 Family? (toppreise.ch will let you find this)
- you have your own domain? You can bypass the GoDaddy requirement as registrar with 4 DNS entries for your domain (this might help: https://www.swinglish.ch/2022/01/setting-up-person...

That gives you outlook.com (which is hosted Exchange for the plebs) with 5 x 50Gb mailboxes and 5 x 1Tb OneDrive (per family member/account). Plus of course M365 Office (you're missing Visio) and 60 minutes a month on Skype out.

I compare this to HUP subs and it's completely worth it.

Thanks.

Yes, trying to be cost efficient. Currently paying about CHF 250 a year for a service which is overkill.

I don't need family access for Office and with HUP the single user is CHF 49 per year.

Yes, we have our own separate domains, so not sure that will work with the solution you mention, whereas I know that it's offered by Apple. If I've understood correctly, we would need to have [e-mail] and [e-mail] rather than [e-mail] and [e-mail]?

If I did go down that route, would I be able to use Office attached to my MS account once the subscription to Office runs out in March, but the Exchange subscription is still running until May?

PS nice blog.

[eeLee]

eyebeebe said:

Thanks.

Yes, trying to be cost efficient. Currently paying about CHF 250 a year for a service which is overkill.

I don't need family access for Office and with HUP the single user is CHF 49 per year.

Yes, we have our own separate domains, so not sure that will work with the solution you mention, whereas I know that it's offered by Apple. If I've understood correctly, we would need to have [e-mail] and [e-mail] rather than [e-mail] and [e-mail]?

If I did go down that route, would I be able to use Office attached to my MS account once the subscription to Office runs out in March, but the Exchange subscription is still running until May?

PS nice blog.

It may not work with 2 domains in one family, that sets up with the main subscriber being the one to set up the domain.

I would assume the MS account can be updated to have the M365I/F subscription attached to it - but that's not something I've done. Have a trawl around https://account.microsoft.com/services to see what you can do or add. I assume it is not limited to using a business-level account.

You may get better value from other services, I frankly like the 1Tb storage and 50Gb mailbox. I also don't know if you can get two individual HUP licences from work and what they would cost.....

[paulrockliffe]

The family HUP plan gives you 5 x 1Tb setups, you can point one domain at it for personalised email, with one email address per family member.

What do you think you're going to lose access to between switch-overs? If it's the office applications, they should continue working with just the unlicensed screen notifications and online will still work. If you were completely stuck for something you can sign up for a Developer Account for three months which would let you install Office for Enterprise using a separate Microsoft account to maintain licensed access to apps.

It's not straightforward understanding what the implications for email are and I would probably look at options for repointing the email in the short-term, at least then if something gets screwed up you can point the emails to a Gmail account or something and pick them up. Then I would bother Microsoft Support and get them walk you through what you need to do.

[eyebeebe]

Thanks both.

The more I look at what I'm planning to do, the more nervous I'm getting about losing 15 years plus of emails.

I'm starting to think that the best option would be to get two M365 subscriptions for CHF 65 each. This would still be half the price I'm paying now and we would each be able to use our own domain.

Can I buy those from the reseller and then add them to my account in the admin centre?

[eeLee]

Firstly, if you're scared of losing your email, file it on a local OST. You can then back this up however you like.....it's drag and drop. My email archives in Outlook.com began and have transitioned through at least two Gmail accounts.....

I would expect you can add the M365 individual or family sub to your account. I use two accounts personally because I have a server backing up to one OneDrive and want it separate to my daily OneDrive.....value never stops HUP comes in more expensive than street prices, I think the best price (toppreise) is around 65,- for family which is the same cost as HUP individual.

My expectations are that you cannot break something here....... but don't rely on that

[Harpoon]

eyebeebe said:

At home I have a Microsoft Exchange Plan for my private email address and my girlfriend's. AIUI to use Office on a laptop as well as 12.9" iPad Pro I need to buy an Office 365 subscription, but because I have an Exchange plan I have to have a small business Office 365 sub rather than a home user one. I've been doing this for about 3 years.

Not sure if it helps, but I have O365 with two E1 mailboxes. Alongside them, I also use Office 365 Family and have the usual access to the 6 accounts for installs, OneDrive etc etc. They work fine together, just need to remember which MS account you log into if you need to do "admin stuff".

[eyebeebe]

eeLee said:

Firstly, if you're scared of losing your email, file it on a local OST. You can then back this up however you like.....it's drag and drop. My email archives in Outlook.com began and have transitioned through at least two Gmail accounts.....

I would expect you can add the M365 individual or family sub to your account. I use two accounts personally because I have a server backing up to one OneDrive and want it separate to my daily OneDrive.....value never stops HUP comes in more expensive than street prices, I think the best price (toppreise) is around 65,- for family which is the same cost as HUP individual.

My expectations are that you cannot break something here....... but don't rely on that

Yes, I've got Outlook open on my Mac now and downloading all the emails. I'll archive them to an OLM (Mac equivalent of a PST/OST). If I stick with MS hosting the email, HUP doesn't really help anyway. Although we are both eligible for it at CHF 49 a year. That's off the table for now.

Harpoon said:

Not sure if it helps, but I have O365 with two E1 mailboxes. Alongside them, I also use Office 365 Family and have the usual access to the 6 accounts for installs, OneDrive etc etc. They work fine together, just need to remember which MS account you log into if you need to do "admin stuff".

That's good to know. Thanks.

I think what I'm going to do then is wait until the Office 365 business runs out in March, but the E1 accounts are still active. I'll then buy one Microsoft 365 subscription from the reseller and see if I can get it recognised in my admin account and migrate my own mailbox across. If it works, I can make sure my OH has a backup and then migrate her to a second account. If it doesn't work, I'll still have time to find another solution or reactivate the E1 plan.

[Harpoon]

eyebeebe said:

That's good to know. Thanks.

I think what I'm going to do then is wait until the Office 365 business runs out in March, but the E1 accounts are still active. I'll then buy one Microsoft 365 subscription from the reseller and see if I can get it recognised in my admin account and migrate my own mailbox across. If it works, I can make sure my OH has a backup and then migrate her to a second account. If it doesn't work, I'll still have time to find another solution or reactivate the E1 plan.

No problem. The Family product is setup via https://setup.office.com/?ms.officeurl=setup

Once active if you try to login via https://login.microsoftonline.com/ and put your e-mail address in, the next screen should ask if you "Work or School" or "Personal account". The Work or School options takes me into the usual O365 admin stuff for my mailboxes, Personal Account lets me install Office, share the license with another person etc.

[eeLee]

btw HUP is no longer the digital download, it's subscriptions. It was dirty cheap for a download of the product for years but now is a not-so-cheap sub