Microsoft - Can you please explain?

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At the start of this year Microsoft has made a change to their Office365 Business package offering. The result being that MS Access and MS Publisher are no longer part of their popular Business Premium subscription offering. Before Jan 2015 this subscription was called Small Business Premium.

I have 3 questions for Microsoft:

  1. So you have changed the Microsoft Office365 offering for Microsoft (Small) Business Premium. As of Jan 2015 you do not offer Microsoft Office365 Small Business Premium anymore and now offers Microsoft Office365 Business Premium. The main difference between the two packages is that Small Business Premium comes with MS Access & MS Publisher and Business Premium does not. Also if you have Small Business Premium and you upgrade to Office 2016 (forced or not) you will lose MS Access & MS Publisher. But your subscription cost will not be reduced even though you lose 2 products.

    How does Microsoft justify this?

  2. With MS Access and Publisher being removed from Office365 (Small) Business Premium Subscription, there is no option to have it added as a separate subscription package (like Project or Visio). If the customer requires MS Access or Publisher they will either need to purchase the products from a shop as a standalone product or upgrade to Office365 Enterprise E3 which is close to twice the cost of (Small) Business Premium.

    Why does Microsoft not offer Access & Publisher as separate products?

  3. According to Office365 support, the reason why MS Access (not sure about Publisher) was removed from (Small) Business Premium is that MS Access is seen as an Enterprise Products. Yes, I had to laugh really hard. MS Access is NOT an enterprise product. It used by many small businesses as a cost effective database/UI solution. An enterprise solution would be a SQL Database and a web or client UI. An Enterprise might use MS Access for prototyping but if they were to use it as an enterprise app they are on a path of failure.

    So my question is why, if MS Access is an Enterprise Application, is it included in the Office365 Personal service offering, as is MS Publisher?


Quidne IT Ltd.