Microsoft is Rebranding Office 365 Groups

A few weeks back, Microsoft announced that they would be changing the branding for some of their Office 365 SKUs. The company is moving deeper into utilizing the Microsoft 365 naming convention and is looking to align products that are not traditionally ‘Office’ apps, into the Microsoft 365 bucket.

The latest update for this will be Office 365 Groups. The company has announced that Office 365 Groups will soon be re-branded to, you guessed it, Microsoft 365 Groups.

If you aren’t familiar with Office 365 Groups, Microsoft defines it as a “cross-application membership service in Office 365. At the basic level, an Office 365 Group is an object in Azure Active Directory with a list of members and a loose coupling to related workloads including a SharePoint team site, Yammer Group, shared Exchange mailbox resources, Planner, Power BI and OneNote. You can add or remove people to the group just as you would any other group-based security object in Active Directory.”

The justification for the move is because the groups enable collaboration across all of Microsoft 365 and not just Office. For the end-user, there is nothing to do, but the updated branding will roll-out over the upcoming quarters.

And as a reminder, these are the Office 365 SKUs that are going to be re-branded as well:

• Office 365 Business Essentials will become Microsoft 365 Business Basic.
• Office 365 Business Premium will become Microsoft 365 Business Standard.
• Microsoft 365 Business will become Microsoft 365 Business Premium.
• Office 365 Business and Office 365 ProPlus will both become Microsoft 365 Apps. Where necessary Microsoft will use the “for business” and “for enterprise” labels to distinguish between the two.

All of these changes are supposed to be in-name-only, for now. If Microsoft does make any more significant updates to branding, we will keep you updated.