Microsoft first announced Office 365 in October 2010, beginning with a private beta with various organizations, leading into a public beta in April 2011, and reaching general availability on June 28, 2011, with a launch aimed originally at corporate users. In October 2022, Microsoft announced that it would discontinue the 'Microsoft Office' brand by January 2023, with most of its products and online productivity services being marketed primarily under the 'Microsoft 365' brand. Most products that were called Office 365 were renamed as Microsoft 365 on the same day. On April 21, 2020, Office 365 was rebranded as Microsoft 365, to emphasize the service's current inclusion of products and services beyond the core Microsoft Office software family (including cloud-based productivity tools and artificial intelligence features). In July 2017, Microsoft introduced a second brand of subscription services for the enterprise market known as Microsoft 365, combining Office 365 with Windows 10 Enterprise volume licenses and other cloud-based security and device management products. Upon the release of Office 2013, Microsoft began to promote the service as the primary distribution model for the Microsoft Office suite, adding consumer-focused plans integrating with services such as OneDrive and Skype, and emphasizing ongoing feature updates (as opposed to non-subscription licenses, where new versions require purchase of a new license, and do not receive feature updates). Some plans also included licenses for the Microsoft Office 2010 software.

The branding Office 365 was first introduced in 2010 to refer to a subscription-based software as a service platform for the corporate market, including hosted services such as Exchange, SharePoint, and Lync Server, and Office on the web.

It also covers subscription plans encompassing these products, including those that include subscription-based licenses to desktop and mobile software, and hosted email and intranet services. It encompasses online services such as, OneDrive, Microsoft Teams, programs formerly marketed under the name Microsoft Office (including applications such as Word, Excel, PowerPoint, and Outlook on Microsoft Windows, macOS, mobile devices, and on the web), enterprise products and services associated with these products such as Exchange Server, SharePoint, and Yammer. Microsoft 365 is a product family of productivity software, collaboration and cloud-based services owned by Microsoft. From top-left: Outlook, OneDrive, Word, Excel, PowerPoint, OneNote, SharePoint, Teams, and Yammer

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