In April 2020, some Office 365 Plans will be re-branded as Microsoft 365 Plans. The plan features are not changing (yet) but the plan names are. Here is a list of new plan names:
Office 365 Pro Plus will be Microsoft 365 Apps for Enterprise – https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/deployoffice/name-change
Office 365 Business will be Microsoft 365 Apps for Business
Office 365 Business Essentials will be Microsoft 365 Business Basic
Office 365 Business Premium will be Microsoft 365 Business Standard
Microsoft 365 Business will be Microsoft 365 Business Premium
Office 365 E1, E3, E5 will not be changing names
IMPORTANT: Only Office 365 ProPlus stand-alone plan (or plans that include ProPlus such as Office 365 E3 & E5) come with shared computer activation. Office 365 Business does NOT include ProPlus/shared computer activation. Shared computer activation is required to install Office on Remote Desktop Services (RDS).
Riptide Hosting can provide Office licensing (Office Standard, Office Professional, or individual components like Excel, Word, MS Access) on a monthly, per-user basis through our MS SPLA agreeement. We can provide Office licensing on any of our hosted offerings (VMs or Dedicated servers). Clients cannot use their own Office 365 licensing on our Virtual Servers. Clients could use their own Office 365 licensing on one of our Dedicated Hardware Servers if they have the appropriate Office 365 ProPlus plan.
Riptide Hosting Virtual Servers – all Microsoft licensing for Windows Server, Office, RDS and SQL Server are licensed through Riptide on a monthly basis. You cannot use your own licensing on our Virtual Servers.
Riptide Hosting Dedicated Servers – either Riptide Hosting can provide the Microsoft licesning on a monthly basis through our MS SPLA, or you could use your own MS licensing on the dedicated server but only certain plans will work on a RDS/terminal server which are Office365 ProPlus Standalone or Office365 Enterprise E3 or E5. Office365 Business plans do not include ProPlus and will not work on a Windows RDS server.
Another option to consider is if your users don’t need a local install of Office on the server (to do things like export reports from an application to Excel), then users might be able to just use the web based versions of Excel/Word by logging into their Microsoft account with OneDrive (or Google Docs, etc). Heavy users of Office will likely want it installed on the server but the web based versions might work fine for occasional use.