In a recent blog post on Microsoft 365 Records Management (RM), we described the features and touched on licensing requirements.

In this post, let's take a closer look at how licensing works for RM across different Microsoft plans.

What’s the difference between Microsoft 365 and Office 365?

From a licensing perspective, Office 365 subscriptions includes apps such as Outlook, Word, Excel, and PowerPoint, along with services such as Exchange, OneDrive, SharePoint, and Microsoft Teams. It’s the core suite you know and love.

Microsoft 365 subscriptions layer in a few more benefits for additional security, device management, and system management including Windows 10 and Enterprise Mobility + Security.

Both Office 365 and Microsoft 365 packages include records management and compliance features to some degree.

A breakdown of records management features across plans

Let’s focus on how the records management features compare across the E3 and E5 plans:

Table: Records management feature comparison across Microsoft 365 and Office 365 plans

As you can see in the chart above, with an E3 license in either Microsoft 365 or Office 365, you can only create and manage non-record labels, which does not give you access to any records management features, such as being able to declare a document as a record or receive proof of disposition.

Instead, you need E5 licenses to conduct records management within Microsoft 365, with the key difference being that only Microsoft 365 E5 allows you to utilize machine learning to automatically classify content to a retention label with trainable classifiers.

You can find the full Microsoft 365 Compliance Licensing comparison, as of April 1, 2020, here: (PDF) | (Excel).

Please speak to a Microsoft Licensing specialist to find the plan that best suit your organization’s needs.

References:

1. Microsoft 365 Security and Compliance Licensing Guidance

2. Compare Microsoft 365 and Office 365 Licensing plans

3. Compare Microsoft 365 Enterprise Plans

4. Compare Office 365 Plans