What Outlook.com Premium brings to Office 365
Microsoft is discontinuing the premium version of Outlook.com and bundling its features with Office 365
Microsoft has discontinued the premium version of Outlook.com and has stopped taking new subscriptions for it. All its features will now be available in Office 365. Those who have an Outlook.com Premium subscription can still use it and even renew the subscription.
New users will have to take an Office 365 Home or Personal subscription, if they don’t have it already. Users won’t have to pay anything in addition to the subscription for these features. Subscription for Home edition costs Rs4,619 annually or Rs460 every month, while the Personal edition costs Rs3,629 per year or Rs360 per month.
Outlook.com Premium was released in February 2017 for enterprise users and costs Rs 1,227 per annum. It has a free version too which misses out on key features such as advertisement free in box, added protection against malwares, more storage for inbox, and premium customer support, advanced sharing options and custom domains. Earlier Office 365 users had access to only the free version. To get these features they had to take the premium subscription of Outlook.com separately.
The biggest advantage of the Outlook.com premium is the advertisement-free experience. This means the Outlook.com interface in Office 365 won’t clutter you mail page with unnecessary advertisements. Besides reducing distraction, it will also speed up things and your mails will load faster.
The premium edition also comes with an extra layer of protection against malware. A lot of malware attacks are carried out through spam emails with malicious links and attachments. The free version of Outlook.com comes with features such as virus and spam filtering. The premium version offers the option to scan attachments for hidden malware using its advanced detection tools. If anything harmful is detected, user will be immediately warned so they won’t end up download it.
The other advantage of the premium version is the extra storage for your mail box. With free version of Outlook.com, users get 15GB storage, but now they will have access to 50GB of storage that comes with Office 365 account. Microsoft also assures free customer care support for premium users, which will now be available to Office 365 users.
The availability of all the features of Outlook.com in Office 365 will is good news for Office 365 users as they won’t have to pay extra for them anymore. It will also make the Office 365 a more powerful productivity tool and can encourage more people to go for it.