Until April 21, 2020, Office 365 and Microsoft 365 were separate but overlapping Microsoft productivity tools or products. (See our blog recently revised blog Office 365 vs Microsoft 365: What’s the Difference? Are They the Same?). But on that date, Microsoft announced that the group of productivity apps formerly known as Office 365 would now be branded “Microsoft 365”.
That’s right, the suite of productivity Apps formerly known as Office 365 is now called “Microsoft 365”. This includes all the incredibly powerful apps such as:
- Teams
- SharePoint Online
- OneDrive
- OneNote
- Planner
- Stream
- Power Automate (App formerly known as Flow)
- Yammer
- Delve
- Sway
- Power Apps
Go to Office.com to see a list of all Apps formerly known as Office 365.
Why did Microsoft – especially at a time when Teams and the brand “Office 365” has just been embraced by literally millions of end-users that previously only knew about Word, Excel and Outlook – change the brand name? Actually – and while the timing may not have been great – there are good reasons. To be fair, this change has been in the works for over a year. To many, Office 365 does conjure visions of only Word, Excel, PowerPoint and Outlook – a very narrow and limiting view of Microsoft 365’s capabilities. The brand transition to Microsoft 365 is designed to raise a greater awareness of how people and businesses can achieve more with the new, innovative Office apps, intelligent cloud services and world-class security. But that’s a subject for a different day and a different blog.
The main purpose of this blog is to clarify the change in branding of Office 365. We have relentlessly driven the Office 365 brand to our customers for several years. It will take time to transition that brand equity to Microsoft 365. It’s like losing an old friend. For the immediate future, Centriq will continue to refer to Office 365 as “Office 365 (now known as Microsoft 365)” in our communications. There may be times (including places on our website) where we still refer just to “Office 365”. Forgive us. Our main goal is to help companies understand the value of Office 365 (now known as Microsoft 365) – see that wasn’t so bad – and recognize that Centriq can help drive adoption throughout your company. Learn about all our M365 training courses here. We look forward to working with you.