Back in March I posted about Office 365 Exchange Online’s online archive features and how great they are for keeping up to 100GB of mail.  Take a read of that here: Exchange online archive awesomeness

This today and earlier this week we saw a couple of announcements from Microsoft around storage and capacity improvements in a couple of key Office 365 areas.

1. SkyDrive Pro.  This gets a bump to 25GB of storage by default. Previously it was 7GB per user.  This is pretty nice for those like me who use SkyDrive Pro to stash their files.  Also you are not limited to 25GB, your Office 365 administrator can bump it up to 100GB too.

2. Exchange Online. Microsoft just bumped the capacity of peoples inboxes to 50GB max.  Time to get my inbox size increased!

It has been really interesting watching the gradual increase in storage quotas along with price drops in the Office 365 service. Back in April 2013 there was a significant set of changes in the SharePoint Online service that increased the tenant storage limits to 25TB! What was more impressive and in my opinion really made SharePoint online A LOT more affordable was the price drop that went with it. 92% reduction from $2.50 USD to $0.20 per GB.  That meant customers with a lot of data who were considering moving from SharePoint on-premises are far less likely to get hung up on price than they previously were.  With a number of pain points likely to make a move like that hard, price was a no brainer to get rid of.

I guess this really shouldn’t be much of a surprise given the cost of storage these days. But these improvements don’t primarily come from that ever decreasing costs of storage drop.  They primarily come from Microsoft getting better and better are running the Office 365 service and bringing their internal COGs (Cost of Goods) down and passing along those savings to customers.

This is great news for both current users of the Office 365 service and future customers alike.

-CJ