What is the difference between Office 365 Home and Office 365 Business? And so, when when you subscribe to Office 365, you are really getting Office 2016 with regular updates/upgrades, and with cloud sync and backup. Clients also get dead simple license management which is very handy for staff turnover and reassignment of assets, or for transferring licenses when aging equipment dies.ĭuring this transition, Microsoft is maintaining both iterations of the platform -standalone Office 2016 and Office 365 subscription. Clients get the always up to date version and the development team no longer has to focus on showy releases, but rather on continual improvement. With the subscription path, their development team will move away from a bi-annual release of a major suite upgrade, and instead constantly release improvements and upgrades as soon as they are available. You can purchase Office 2016 as a standalone product with a onetime purchase, but Microsoft’s future plan is to eliminate this model and push everyone into the subscription path.

Microsoft has continued this trend, and the current incarnation is Office 2016. In the past, the naming convention of Office software was simple.

It is not the name of any particular piece of software, as is commonly mistaken. Office 365 is the name of the software as a subscription service Microsoft is moving to.

Office microsoft 365 home premium