One misconception with Office 365,
and something never referred to by Google, is that the licences
customers subscribe to for Micrososoft’s cloud platform can also be used on
premise.
Great article by Loryan Strant he is an Microsoft Office 365 MVP.
I can understand that my opening statement might not make much
sense, so let me break it down further. Any Office 365 licences (in the Enterprise family only) which you
subscribe to also grant you the right to use their on-premise
equivalent.
To keep it simple, Plan 1 of any of the individual products that make
up the Office 365 suite (i.e. Exchange Online, SharePoint Online,
Office Web Apps and Lync Online) gives you the equivalent Standard
Client Access Licence (CAL). Plan 2 is the equivalent of an Enterprise
CAL. Plan 3 or “Plus” which will only be available for Lync Online later
this year and is the equivalent of the voice component.
Effectively what this means is that you can mix and match cloud and
on-premise users without having to acquire additional licences. For
example you could run the Enterprise version of SharePoint Server 2010
on-premise but use the My Site functionality of SharePoint Online.
Or you could run a hybrid of some users an on-premise Exchange
Server, while the mobile workers reside in SharePoint Online but all
mail is filtered through Forefront Online Protection for Exchange (part
of Exchange Online).
This allows greater flexibility for organisations looking at moving
to the cloud at their own pace or in a long term co-existence model.
It’s certainly a far cry from the ‘all or nothing’ online approach of
Google Apps and goes a long way to explaining why having licence choices
can actually be a good thing.
Here's a table that lays it all out.
