Microsoft continues to improve it’s Office 365 offering and it looks like companies will someday enjoy a much larger base storage per tenant in their SharePoint Online instances.
Currently (at the time of this writing) Office 365 tenants have a base storage of 10GB + 500MB per subscribed user. See their official boundaries and limits here. Unless you have hundreds of users this storage amount isn’t very much and has caused many small and medium sized businesses to have to purchase additional storage from Microsoft at a cost of $0.20 / GB / month. It doesn’t sound like much but it can add up over time.
Last year in March of 2014 Microsoft announced that they would accommodate SharePoint site collections with a size of 1TB and an unlimited size on tenants. This opened the doors to companies being able to move all their content, no matter what size, into Microsoft’s SharePoint Online offering. O365 subscribers still had to pay for the storage overage though.
With the continued decrease in storage costs it looks like Microsoft is planning to increase the base storage from 10GB to a much larger 1TB. This means tenants new formula will be 1TB + 500MB per subscribed user which especially for small businesses makes a massive difference. Unfortunately we have yet to receive a release date for this new development, only the details below which have been posted on their Office 365 Roadmap.
The post also hints at Microsoft’s potential rebranding of SharePoint Online to Office 365 “Sites” which was hinted at during the Microsoft Ignite conference. This change makes way for the move toward SharePoint being looked as the underlying development platform for Office 365 NextGen Portals like Office 365 Video and Sites being the building blocks for subscribers to create their own portals. This could leave the SharePoint name to be the designation for the on premise version.
Of course, just because this shows up as in development on the Office 365 roadmap doesn’t mean it will definitely get rolled out, features have been cancelled before. I think this one is pretty safe though.
From Microsoft:
Storage and file upload improvements for Sites and OneDrive for Business:
This update will bring two key enhancements for Sites in Office 365, videos uploaded into Office 365 Video, and OneDrive for Business. First, you will be able to upload files greater than 2GB – up to 10GB – to both Sites’ document libraries and OneDrive for Business. We, too, will provide a greater amount of default storage for Office 365 Sites usage (for documents and information); Office 365 tenants will now get 1TB + (500MB * # of E/A/G users); this calculation used to be 10GB + (500MB * # of E/A/G users).
Written by: Owen Runnals, Director of Professional Services
