Office 365 Family & Exchange Online Plan 1 as a "family solution"

stoofa

stoofa

stoofa

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Hi All,
I'm hoping there are some people more familiar with the Microsoft licensing and interactions who might be able to help - as I'm getting conflicting information from various places.

As a family we share an Office 365 Family subscription, 6 of us paying around £10 / year and having 1TB OneDrive and all of the MS desktop apps.
I own a personal domain which is surname.com however I never took advantage of adding a personal domain to my O365 Family subscription, so I've just been doing some basic forwarding for the addresses I've setup for family members.

Exchange Online (Plan 1) licenses would give me 50GB mailboxes for around £3.50 / user / month - which seems a good way to get a reliable, "proper" email solution for everyone. However, I have conflicting information at this stage.
I'm told that because my Microsoft account has a "home" package assigned to it (Office 365 Family) I wouldn't be able to use it to create a Tennant and buy OE1 licences. However, I assume I can simply create a new MS account and create this?
Then I was informed that the MS Outlook that I install on desktops via O365 Family would not be able to make a MAPI connection to Exchange Online and I'd instead have to reduce security, use IMAP or POP and so might as well use any old email provider.

Ultimately what I am trying to achieve:

6 family members with access to Office 365 Family - all download Outlook onto their various machines
6 Exchange Online (P1) licenses linked to email addresses from my custom domain
Each of those 6 family members can use their installed version of Outlook to connect to the OE mailboxes without the need to reduce security etc.

It's been hinted the only way I can achieve all of this would be to buy 6x Business Standard licenses - which is completely impractical.

O365 Family - £60 / year. 6x OE1 licenses - £250 year = £310
6x Business Standard licenses - £871 / year
 
When you try to sign up for Exchange Online you should be prompted to create a new account and you should be able to use the e-mail address of your existing Microsoft account for this. At the end of this you are going to end up with two accounts per person. The consumer Microsoft Account, which you already have with the Office 365 family licenses; and new "Work or School" Microsoft Account that is your Entra ID attached to your tenant, and this will have your Exchange Online license.

Once you link your domain to your tenant you will no longer be able create new consumer Microsoft accounts using email addresses from that domain (they allowed this in the past, and it ends up getting very confusing for users).

Regarding Outlook, I'm not 100% sure but as far as I know the Outlook app included with Office 365 Family is the same as the app you would get on a business or enterprise plan. If Office 365 Family gives you a device activation, then in theory you should be able to install and activate it using your consumer account and then log in to your Entra account (as an Exchange Online account) and access your email; but if it is a user activation then you might find Outlook becomes unlicensed once you switch it from your consumer account to your new Entra account (which is probably where you get to the suggestion of using POP/IMAP as a workaround to that, because in that case you would be accessing the Entra account email via your consumer accounts license).
 
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@stoofa

Just found this post and interestingly I'm looking at the same thing from the opposite direction.

I currently have a "work or school" account in which I have an Exchange Online subscription which is linked to my domain. Generally I use Outlook.com webmail on my PC to access this and the Outlook mobile app on my phone and tablet which works fine.

Now I also have a 365 E3 licence through work and have used this to install the client apps on my home PC, including Outlook.
Whilst Outlook is thus licensed through the work 365 subscription, there's no problem configuring it to access my Exchange Online mailbox via the "native" 365 connection type - it just works via Autodiscover.

It seems like this is the scenario you're looking at, using a different account to license 365 than the one which hosts your Exchange Online mailbox(es). The only difference being that my 365 sub is a business one.

Now, my situation is that I may be losing the business 365 licence at some point and was thus wondering if I could take out my own 365 Personal subscription just to get the apps but then connect Outlook to my Exchange Online as I currently do.
This seems to be exactly what you're after so I'd be interested to hear if you've got any further with this.
 
I have two paid Exchange Online mailboxes (Exchange Online Plan 1). I've used that since July 2016.

Sifting back through e-mails, I think I started subscribing to 365 Family in 2021 (for Office & OneDrive). So I have Office installed and activated against my consumer Microsoft account (as detailed by @andshrew ). Outlook works absolutely fine against my Exchange Online mailbox which is on my Entra tennant and uses the same e-mail address as my consumer login. With the right Autodiscover DNS in place for my domain, Outlook does it stuff automatically when setting up on a new PC and going through 2FA/MFA. Outlook uses native ActiveSync or whatever it is called these days - none of that bodge-tastic IMAP or POP3 stuff.
 
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What you're asking can be done, i've never seen the family outlook cant connect to corporate exchange issue before.

If all of your current personal MS accounts are @surname.com I would change them to @outlook.com addresses. They are just usernames and not having them the same as your corporate @surname.com login / email address will save you a world of pain going forward.
 
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