Microsoft Releases New Microsoft 365 Basic Products and Apps This Month — Redmondmag.com

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Microsoft releases new Microsoft 365 Basic products and apps this month

Microsoft announced product news for Microsoft 365 this week. This includes offering a new consumer Basic product.

Microsoft also announced that the site for accessing Microsoft 365 Apps, namely Microsoft 365.com, is now commercially available. Additionally, Office 365 apps for Windows and mobile devices are launching this month.

New Microsoft 365 base product
Microsoft 365 Basic is a new low-cost “premium” Office subscription bundle for individual users. The Basic product will be available on January 30, 2023.

Microsoft 365 Basic is priced at $1.99/month or $19.99/year. Basic purchasers will be available on January 30, 2023 from this Microsoft Plans page. You can also purchase “from OneDrive and Outlook apps”.

Here’s what the Microsoft 365 Basic plan offers subscribers:

• Access to web and mobile versions of Office applications such as Clipchamp, Excel, Microsoft Editor, OneNote, PowerPoint and Word
• Access to Outlook for email and calendar features that are ad-free and said to be protected by “built-in security tools”
• Access to 100 GB of OneDrive cloud storage, and
• Access to “Affordable Support Experts for Microsoft 365 and Windows 11”.

Microsoft already offers a “standalone” OneDrive subscription plan for $19.99 per year that offers 100 GB of online storage. But that plan goes away. It will be superseded by the Microsoft 365 Basic plan.

Subscribers to the 100GB “standalone” OneDrive service will be automatically switched to the Microsoft 365 Basic plan after “January 30, 2023,” the announcement states.

Microsoft is committed to enhancing Microsoft 365 Basic subscriptions in the near future. For example, we plan to add “advanced security features like ransomware recovery and password-protected shared links to OneDrive later in 2023.”

Microsoft also promised enhancements to OneDrive storage. Starting February 1, 2023, Microsoft will enable “Overview of storage usage across Microsoft 365, including OneDrive, Outlook, and more.” This simplified view shows how much of your total capacity is used and shows total storage usage by apps such as OneDrive storage and Outlook storage.

Microsoft 365 Apps News
Microsoft’s announcement also provided an update on the status of the newly rebranded Microsoft 365 Apps.

The Microsoft 365 Apps website, which replaced Office.com, is currently in the “General Availability” release phase. Production versions of Microsoft 365 Apps for Windows and mobile are expected to be released later this month.

Here’s how Microsoft characterizes the availability of Microsoft 365 Apps:

We are excited to announce that Microsoft 365 Apps is generally available on the web at Microsoft 365.com and will be available for Windows and mobile on both Google Play and the Apple App Store in late January 2023.

Microsoft 365 Apps are rebranded Office.com sites, Office Mobile apps, and Office apps for Windows. For this rebranding, Microsoft has dropped the entire Office name and uses new graphic icons for Office products. The branding switch was originally explained in October.