Microsoft to increase device limits for Office 365 consumer subscription users
Starting October 2, Microsoft will be increasing the device limits for its Office 365 Home and Personal subscribers. Office 365 Home and Personal users will be able to install Office on all their devices, but they'll be limited in terms of the number of simultaneously signed-in users allowed.
Currently, Office 365 Home, which costs $99.99 per year, enables five people in a "household" to use the core Office apps (Word, Excel, PowerPoint, Outlook and OneNote) and get 1 TB per person (for a total of 5 TB) of OneDrive Storage. The current limit on number of devices total which can run these Office apps is 10 across the five users. Office 365 Personal, which costs $69.99, currently limits one user to installing these Office apps five devices.
Starting on October 2nd, Office 365 Personal users can sign into five concurrent devices at the same time. They can load the Office apps onto multiple devices, but only be signed into five. For Home, starting October 2nd, that updates to six users, across all your devices and each user can be signed into five devices at the same time. Technically, that means an Office 365 Home customer could have 30 Home subscriptions running at the same time, with each user getting five signed-in devices.
Microsoft's August 30 announcement blog post and the accompanying Frequently Asked Questions (FAQ) document about the coming changes have more details.
To take advantage of these changes, Office 365 consumer subscribers won't need to do anything; they'll just automatically happen. Office 365 consumer customers also will start being able to manage their Office 365 Home and Personal subscriptions from their Microsoft account overview page as of October 2.
I asked Microsoft if the company plans to change the limits on the number of devices allowed under Office 365 commercial subscriptions and was told by a spokesperson the company had nothing more to share at this time.