Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Microsoft allows use of personal Microsoft 365 subscriptions at work

theregister.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

81–90 of 95 posts

Re: Microsoft allows use of personal Microsoft 365 subscriptions at work

#81

Post by ocdtrekkie »

tsimionescu wrote: post #77
ocdtrekkie wrote: post #72

Earlier quoted context omitted.

So they would like you to believe they renamed Office 365 so you overpurchase: Office 365, which is just the office suite and email, is a separate set of SKUs from Microsoft 365, which also includes Windows Enterprise, Entra, etc.

There really is nothing officially called "Office 365" anymore, or "Office" in general. You're right that they have some (confusing) distinctions between Microsoft 365 and Microsoft 365 Copilot. For example, indeed you can purchase a "Microsoft 365" subscription that doesn't give you the enterprise AI features - but the app your employees will install to get access to Excel and Word is still called "Microsoft 365 Cop…

Please don't try to correct people if you do not know what you are talking about. I have quoted the different SKUs recently.

https://www.microsoft.com/en-us/microsoft-365/enterprise/com...

Office 365 E3 is sold for $20.75 a month, Microsoft 365 E3 is sold for $33.75 a month.

And yes, confusingly, Microsoft also sells Microsoft 365 Apps for Enterprise, which you'd think would be closer to the Microsoft 365 bundle... but it's not, it's a stripped down version of the Office 365 one. None of it makes sense, but "Office 365" is still very much, as I said previously, a whole set of subscription packages sold today, separate from Microsoft 365 ones.

I also recommend this spreadsheet if you need to truly break your brain: https://cdn-dynmedia-1.microsoft.com/is/content/microsoftcor...

Re: Microsoft allows use of personal Microsoft 365 subscriptions at work

#82

Post by pwdisswordfishy »

hetman wrote: post #80
EvanAnderson wrote: post #55

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Oh, shit. I could have gotten my old plan? Yay. >sigh< I assumed I was just stuck paying more and didn't research it.

Almost. After battling with support for several months, a friend of mine recently learned that versions of Office without AI do not allow you to create Teams meetings that last longer than an hour. Makes me wonder what other features they're leaving out.

> versions of Office without AI do not allow you to create Teams meetings that last longer than an hour

What other advantages are there?

Re: Microsoft allows use of personal Microsoft 365 subscriptions at work

#83

Post by constantcrying »

This is absolutely ridiculous. Microsoft is encouraging employees of other companies to break company policy, so that Microsoft can gather more data.

Uploading company internal documents to Microsofts servers, circumventing IT, is obviously something most companies would see as a severe violation of duties by the employee.

Re: Microsoft allows use of personal Microsoft 365 subscriptions at work

#84

Post by tsimionescu »

ocdtrekkie wrote: post #81
tsimionescu wrote: post #77

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There really is nothing officially called "Office 365" anymore, or "Office" in general. You're right that they have some (confusing) distinctions between Microsoft 365 and Microsoft 365 Copilot. For example, indeed you can purchase a "Microsoft 365" subscription that doesn't give you the enterprise AI features - but the app your employees will install to get access to Excel and Word is still called "Microsoft 365 Cop…

Please don't try to correct people if you do not know what you are talking about. I have quoted the different SKUs recently. https://www.microsoft.com/en-us/microsoft-365/enterprise/com... Office 365 E3 is sold for $20.75 a month, Microsoft 365 E3 is sold for $33.75 a month. And yes, confusingly, Microsoft also sells Microsoft 365 Apps for Enterprise, which you'd think would be closer to the Microsoft 365 bundle... b…

Oh, interesting that they're still using it for subscription bundles, thank you for the correction. It's certainly gone from all of their B2C marketing that I could find - and it's also gone from the official app names. They're such a strange marketing department.

Re: Microsoft allows use of personal Microsoft 365 subscriptions at work

#85

Post by f4uCL9dNSnQm »

danudey wrote: post #8

If Copilot was so great, surely I would have been asked to opt-in to a better Office 365 family plan with Copilot enabled, rather than trying to dark-pattern me into paying for a more expensive Copilot-enabled plan against my will (forcing me to attempt to cancel in order to be offered my old plan). It probably doesn't help that Microsoft is using 'Copilot' to mean so many different things - their Office AI integrati…

I found it disappointing, that the same time MS gets a fine for bundling Teams with Office, they bundle another tool with it. As far I can tell it is an effective maneuver, previous company I worked for gave up selfhosted Mattermost instance, because "there is no point in maintaining it when we get Teams for free".

Re: Microsoft allows use of personal Microsoft 365 subscriptions at work

#86

Post by phatskat »

netsharc wrote: post #34
zrobotics wrote: post #16

Earlier quoted context omitted.

FTA: "Government tenants (GCC/DoD) for some reason don't support this capability, the one that Baroudi insists "does not create new data exposure risks." So the government customers that can really strike back at MS don't get this enabled by default. Very interesting... I would also wonder if this would trigger IT review due to data access patterns. Having copilot start accessing documents would likely trigger certai…

How do they even prevent leaks? Trying to paste something and getting a "Your organization's policy disallows this" would be amazing. Next they should block me when I try to type the content manually into the Glorified Auto-Correct..

I actually ran into this recently. Someone linked a doc in iirc a teams chat. Ok, I have teams on my phone. Click the link and get a basic file view, controls are wonky so I’ll download it and…

> You need Edge to download this file

Oh no thanks, not on my phone. I can screenshot the relevant part?

> Screenshot is a black rectangle

Ok well I can copy and pa- fuck!

> Clipboard contains “your organization’s security policy prohibits copying on this device”

—

Also, my org’s policies apparently prevent me from using the official GitHub app, but I can browse the repo on edge? Make it stop.

Re: Microsoft allows use of personal Microsoft 365 subscriptions at work

#88

Post by f4uCL9dNSnQm »

gessha wrote: post #26

Wait, isn’t this similar to Microsoft+Explorer bundling from eons ago?

No need to look so far back: https://www.theverge.com/news/776968/microsoft-teams-eu-comm... . I didn't even know they weaseled out their way out of that penalty.

Re: Microsoft allows use of personal Microsoft 365 subscriptions at work

#89

Post by user_of_the_wek »

thesuperbigfrog wrote: post #63
csb6 wrote: post #35

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What is it with Microsoft and confusing product naming schemes? There was Xbox One X/Xbox One S/Xbox Series S/Xbox Series X. Or .NET (previously .NET Core) vs. .NET Framework (which everyone used to just call “.NET”).

>> What is it with Microsoft and confusing product naming schemes? You can use Windows App [1] to connect to Windows to run your Windows apps. [1] https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/windows-app/overview

I also use Windows App to connect to my Fedora box from my Mac :-P

Re: Microsoft allows use of personal Microsoft 365 subscriptions at work

#90

Post by david_allison »

nashashmi wrote: post #49
willis936 wrote: post #13

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I cancelled my 365 subscription last night and was surprised to see that I was scheduled to pay $100 next month for an annual subscription tier that adds AI features that I would never use. The most valuable plan they offer is the one they charge the least for.

Yes they recently raised the price by merging copilot into it. No version of office is offered without copilot.

In April, I switched to Microsoft 365 Personal Classic which doesn't contain Copilot.

Has this been discontinued?

Post reply on HN