Thought some of you might find this information useful considering how steep the March hike was.
FROM MICROSOFT:
Many thanks all for your patience as we have been working through the impact of the upcoming pricing changes. The impact to nonprofit pricing will be as follows:
Price increases, as was first announced will reflect as:
• Office 2019 prices will increase over current on-premises pricing
o The price increase will include Office client, Enterprise CAL, Core Cal, and server products (Windows Server, Exchange Server, SharePoint Server, etc.)
• Windows 10 Enterprise E3 offers will be renamed:
o E3 will now refer to the per user offer only- Windows 10 Enterprise E3 per User becomes Windows 10 Enterprise E3.
o Windows 10 Enterprise E3 per Device becomes Windows 10 Enterprise.
o The price of Windows 10 Enterprise will be raised to match the price of Windows 10 Enterprise E3.
o Windows 10 Enterprise E5 per device will be discontinued
We’re just moving everyone to o365. It’s saved us a ton not having to pay for local mail server software and hardware. I plan to start taking advantage of Sharepoint and yammer collaboration tools soon.
I definitely think the best move is to lean in and try and take full advantage of everything the new cloud offerings have to offer that makes sense for your org. There was never any guarantee on how long the gravy train of free and heavily discounted Microsoft tools would hold up, so now it’s down to rolling with the punches and trying to stay on Microsoft’s “good” side.
We moved to O365 a few years ago for email as folks wanted more functionality with their mobile devices, calendaring and contacts across multiple devices.
Then, because Sharepoint/OneDrive is part of that, we migrated over 900 GIG of data from onsite server storage to SP/OD. I created document libraries to match the server drives/folders and then setup sync’s inside OD clients so that a person can sync a Sharepoint folder inside of OneDrive, which gives them quick, local access to the files.
It’s not perfect, there are quirks that people had to adjust to, but we don’t manage an onsite file storage which cut the cost of a server when we replaced it also. And people can get to their data on multiple devices pretty much wherever they are as long as they have internet service.