Service Descriptions – The Tech Blog of Dan Usher

SharePoint Online Service Descriptions – Hidden Gem

TL;dr – http://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/office/dn788955

So I should have posted this a while ago… back in December 2013 (http://www.sharepointdan.com/2013/12/29/sharepoint-online-versus-on-premise-v15/), but figured that it deserved some reminding to folks that might be looking for it…

If you’re like me and you get questions about SharePoint Online and how it compares to SharePoint On-Premises, you typically just start drawing from experiences – some that might be subjective, some that might be objective. Regardless, it’s not something that typically provides for an overarching analysis of services that SharePoint Online provides for thereby leaving you in a rut of sorts trying to determine what each different version of SharePoint and SharePoint Online provide for.

If you’re familiar with Microsoft, the SharePoint Product group released spiffy downloadable Excel spreadsheets detailing the different capabilities and feature sets of the different SKUs (Foundation, Standard, Enterprise) SharePoint for both the 2007 and 2010 versions. With SharePoint 2013, many of us were wondering where we could find something like this for the most recent version – sure there was the Office 365 service description but for those of us working with On-Premises deployments we didn’t know where would get this information.

This is available here – http://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/office/dn788955

The Product Group snuck this in somewhere in fall of 2013 – I can say this because I was working with a client at the time and stumbled upon it in an update and was ecstatic 🙂

So what does this have? It’s got ever SKU of Office 365 as well as the On-Premises feature sets so if you want to compare what SharePoint Online has in E3 against what SharePoint 2013 Enterprise provides for you can do that comparison. The spreadsheet also has built in filters so that you’re able to choose the SKU you want and compare between SKUs easily.

If you decide that you want a full up view of the Service Description displayed through Excel Online, you can simply https://onedrive.live.com/view.aspx?cid=41e528b989881d4a&id=documents&resid=41E528B989881D4A!194&app=Excel&authkey=!AJTaHXrAwKrOd68&.

And what’s more if you want to download a copy of the spreadsheet for use later, you can simply click on the Download button within the Excel Online application to pull down a point in time copy. Mind you that similar to the Service Descriptions that overarch all of Office 365, these are updated regularly – the date of the update to the Excel file is displayed in the document in the upper left cell.

Happy comparisons!

TL; dr – http://www.office365sd.com

One of the most common questions that I hear on a regular basis is, “How do I decide which Office 365 plan should I get? Just the small or mid-size business or do I need the E plan?”

Up until recently, if you were an organization that was running Active Directory on-premises and you were hoping to use the same password or federate your identity, I would have told you that you needed at least the Mid-Size business plan or one of the E plans. However, Microsoft has changed things up and more or less all of their business plans (not the consumer plans) now support the use of Azure Active Directory integration.

But wait, you’re still scratching your head asking the question, “But which plan do I need?” Without reading through the marketing information on the office.com site, I’d recommend you hop on over to the Service Descriptions to determine what really meets your needs and requirements.

“But Dan, that’s a lot of work…” True, you can go with the information that’s presented just at office.com and get up and running now and change things down the road plan wise… or you can go over to the Service Descriptions and figure out what you really need.

“But Dan, I don’t have time to hunt and peck for URLs…” Sure you do… no wait, you don’t. So head on over to http://www.office365sd.com.

Remember that the Service Descriptions are updated regularly so you probably want to bookmark that handy URL that Microsoft put out there for you to find the resource more quickly.