Exhange Hosted Archiving to Office 365: Understand Your Licensing Options

***NOTE: Customer that have transitioned from EHA to Office 365 have been provided with a 1 year subscription.  Microsoft is committed to providing all customers with 2 years of Exchange Online Plan 2 for those who qualify (see below) and will be extending those customers subscriptions of Exchange Online Plan 2.  Extensions will be provided at the end of the first years term prior to the licensing expiring.  Customer do not need to take any action to extend these license unless they do not qualify as per the information below.   ***

Office 365 has two flavors of advanced archiving solutions that are available to customers depending on whether your Exchange Server is on-premises or in the cloud. For more information, see Exchange Online: Services. Based on your organization’s existing archiving scenario you will be migrated to a comparable Office 365 scenario. Refer to the table below for a view of the different scenarios. 

Customers with an Existing Enterprise Agreement (including CASA & U.S. Gov’t)

During the transition, customers who have an active Enterprise agreement will be provided with $0 Exchange Online Plan 2 licenses for the total number of provisioned users to be used for the transition.  Your existing Enterprise Agreement will govern your use of your new Office 365 advanced archiving service during the transition period.  The license term will depend on your termination of your existing agreement.  Customers who's agreement expire within 12 months will be provided with 1 year of free Exchange Online Plan 2 licenses.  Customers who's agreement expires within between 12 and 24 months will be provided with 2 years free of Exchange Online Plan 2.  You will then need to purchase the appropriate licenses to continue using the Office 365 archiving services once these licenses have expried. 

Customers with a Microsoft Volume Licensing (Open, Select, or variations of)

Licensing During Transition of Your Service

During the transition customers, who are on or had a Volume Licensing agreement and are an active EHA customer, will be provided with a fully paid license of Exchange Online Plan 2 for a period of 2 years. These licenses will be placed into your account and at the beginning of the transition and will be provided with 1 year at a time. 

If you purchased Exchange Hosted Archive (EHA) under an Open, Open Value Subscription, Select, or Select Plus agreement and have not signed an Office 365 Online Agreement, Microsoft will create a new Office 365 tenant on your behalf.  By accepting the credentials for your new tenant, you accept the Microsoft Online Services Agreement

Direct/Legacy Frontbridge Customers

Licensing During Transition of Your Service

Customers under a direct or legacy FrontBridge agreement will receive 2 years of Exchange Online Plan 2 licenses.  By accepting and using these licenses you agree to terminate your legacy agreement and will be bound by the Microsoft Online Services Agreement. 

Customer who have received licenses of Office 365 E3

As part of the transition you may have received trial licenses of E3.  Only Exchange Online Plan 2 will be covered by the Microsoft Online Services Agreement or your existing Office online agreement.

Office 365 Exchange Online Plan 1 customers

Microsoft will automatically upgrade your subscription to Exchange Online Plan 2 subscription for users who are already assigned an Exchange Online Plan 1 license.

As part of the transition, Microsoft will add a number of licenses into your existing Office 365 tenant.  Your billing administrator will likely receive a thank you e-mail from Microsoft Licensing indicating that new licenses have been added. These licenses are provided to you at no cost for the duration specified above.  Please retain a copy of the email for your records. There is no immediate action required however you should contact your Microsoft Account team, Partner or Licensing Specialist at your earliest convenience to plan for the eventual transitioning of your existing EHA licenses to Office 365.