Microsoft has introduced new features to Microsoft Office 365 Home Premium allowing one subscription to be used by five people across five different devices, making it cost-effective and easy for more family and friends to benefit from the program.

“In the past, it has been common for families and friends to share a single desktop computer. We know that today this is a declining trend particularly because of the high growth of mobile device adoption in Africa. But this shouldn’t mean abandoning the advantages and cost-savings of shared technology resources completely, especially with the power of the cloud, which enables sharing across different form factors and geographies,” says Marc Israel, Office Division Group Lead for Microsoft West, East and Central Africa and Indian Ocean Islands.

The program has also been upgraded to provide each user their own 20GB of OneDrive, formerly SkyDrive, and this benefit was previously only accessible to one subscriber. So the whole family gets 100GB additional storage as well as 60 free Skype world calling credits.

In addition to these benefits, the family gets five installs of the latest Office suite (for PC and Mac) with the latest versions of Word, Excel, PowerPoint, Outlook, OneNote, Publisher, and Access as well as five installs of Office Mobile for tablets and smartphones.

Microsoft Office 365 was launched one year ago in Kenya and other East and Southern Africa markets, so far the suite has seen a tremendous growth with businesses adopting it.

Adding users is easy and the main subscriber just needs to sign in to their account page and select to share their subscription benefits. This allows extended users to access any of the subscriber’s installs and manage them as their own, while using their individual Microsoft account rather than that of the subscriber. But the main subscriber still has the control to limit installs and can deactivate them while allowing the extended user to keep their SkyDrive storage.

“To get Office Mobile, the household member simply downloads the Office Mobile for Office 365 mobile app from the Google App Store or the Apple App Store onto their phone and activates it using their Microsoft account,” Israel says

Other new features include Office updates that will be provided through the subscription at no additional cost and updates will occur regularly and automatically over the cloud.

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