14 DAY TRIAL // Microsoft has just announced a new special offer for some Office 365 customers that includes unlimited storage on OneDrive, the company's cloud-based storage service that's going through some pretty big changes these days.
Specifically, Office 365 customers with an Enterprise, Government, or Education subscription will automatically receive unlimited storage as part of OneDrive for Business. Microsoft says that this includes unlimited storage for individuals in organizations with more than five people and subscribed to Office 365 Enterprise E3, E4 and E5, Office 365 Government E3, E4 and E5, Office 365 Education, OneDrive for Business Plan 2 and SharePoint Online Plan 2.
“We will begin rolling out increased storage to these customers by the end of this month, starting with an automatic increase from 1 TB to 5 TB per user. We expect this rollout to complete by the end of March 2016. After this point, customers who want additional storage can request it as needed by contacting Microsoft support,” Microsoft explains.
The free storage saga
Microsoft announced in November a series of changes that would impact OneDrive users with free plans and Office 365 customers who previously had unlimited storage options.
Basically, Microsoft decided to cut down the amount of free storage offered to new and existing users from 15 GB to just 5 GB, but this change caused public uproar in the community. Earlier this month, the company reverted the change and offered users the possibility of keeping their 15 GB of storage space if they claim it. Everyone else will drop to just 5 GB.
As far as the unlimited storage option is concerned, Microsoft has no intention of bringing it back, saying that some people used it for completely different purposes than expected, including the upload of movies and DVR recordings. Obviously, seeing the company again offering unlimited storage is very odd, but we're pretty sure taking back the space provided to government customers would be a lot more difficult than it was in the case of free users.