If you’re a public sector or government entity, be careful when considering purchasing Microsoft 365 F3 licensing to “save money” over Microsoft 365 G3.
TRADING BUDGET FOR COMPLIANCE & GOVERNANCE
Getting Microsoft 365 F3 user subscription licenses for a segment of your users may be a great solution for saving money on licensing for “field workers”, “technicians” & “non-office based workers” that don’t have the same robust needs as traditional information workers… but it’s only a good option if you don’t have governance or compliance needs for these workers.
DIFFERENCES BETWEEN E3 & F3
This article goes over the differences between E/Enterprise licenses & F/Field Worker user subscription licenses however there’s more than this.
- Changing from a Microsoft 365 E plan to a Microsoft 365 F plan
https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/microsoft-365/frontline/switch-from-enterprise-to-frontline?view=o365-worldwide
Here are a few features not available to Microsoft 365 F3 licensed users:
- Ability to run eDiscovery searches on F3 user email, files, chat
- Ability to put an F3 user’s mailbox on either Litigation Hold or In-place Hold
- Ability to Audit user content
- Ability to provide Email Archiving (aka Archive Mailbox)
- Ability to apply Data Loss Prevention rules for email, files, chat or endpoints
- Use more than 2GB of storage per F3 mailbox
- Ability to Delegate Access to others to the mailbox
- Ability to recover a single item in an Exchange mailbox
Many of these limitations are summarized in the table comparing subscription license types:
- Modern Work Subscription Comparisons – Enterprise
https://go.microsoft.com/fwlink/?linkid=2139145
Note: For folks that have Microsoft 365 F3 and discover they have a need for one or more of the above features, the solution is to purchase one of the following for each existing F3 licensee:
- Exchange Online Plan 2
- Step up to Microsoft 365 E3/G3
kurtsh
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