Microsoft today announced name changes to the Office 365 subscription plans in the Business line, substituting "Microsoft 365" instead.

The Redmond, Wash. developer did not touch subscription plans aimed at enterprise, education and government.

Plan names will automatically change on April 21, Microsoft said in an online statement. Prices of the plans will not change.

• Office 365 Business Essentials, the lowest-priced plan in the Business line, will become Microsoft 365 Business Basic.

• Office 365 Business, the middling plan in the trio that provides the Office applications and OneDrive, but no other services, will become Microsoft 365 Apps.

• Office 365 Business Premium, the most capable and most expensive subscription plan of the three, will become Microsoft 365 Business Standard.

Microsoft will change the moniker of Microsoft 365 Business to Microsoft 365 Business Premium to fit it into the Business line as the top-dollar $20 per-user per-month plan. That subscription adds security and management tools to Office 365 Business Standard, née Premium. (Currently, this is the lowest-priced plan in the Microsoft 365 line. After the name changes, though, it will fall somewhere in the middle.)

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Last year marked a slight decrease in global technology M-A activity from the blockbuster year that was 2018 & when SAP bought Qualtrics for $8 billion, IBM acquired Red Hat for a staggering $33 billion and Broadcom picked up CA Technologies for $18.9 billion in cash.

As of the end of Q3 2019, technology M-A deals worth $245 billion had been announced globally, marking a decrease of 25% year-on-year according to GlobalData.

Which mergers and acquisitions does 2020 have in store? If January alone is anything to go by then there will be no slowing of major deals across the industry, with security already proving to be a hot area.

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This developer whoresponsible for a daily report to the managers at a semiconductor manufacturing site decides to put together a process to automatically send out the report every weekday at 8 a.m., reports a pilot fish on the scene.

The report does show up in managers& inboxes pretty reliably, although there are occasional problems. When that happens, the developer gets a call and the report shows up.

But eventually, in a business downturn, the developer is laid off.

And starting the very next week, the report fails to appear in managers& mailboxes.

Fish and his colleagues aren&t sure whatwrong, so they start looking for the automated process to generate the report.

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Despite disturbing errors of judgement related to privacy and security, Zoom appears to have become the most popular solution for online collaboration, in use across enterprise, government and individuals.

I&ve kicked the app around to surface a few less-visible features you might find useful & most of which should be helpful for every platform, not just Apple&s.

People don&t need to see you in your room

I&ve been on Twitter long enough to have seen plenty of peopleoffices, rooms and other personal spaces in the background of the Zoom chat screenshots people seem so fond of sharing at the moment.It's funny how people seem to like sitting in front of their books.

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Companies have scattered to the wind, once-formidable armies of workers enclosed in glass buildings now sundered, each employee at his or her own outpost, whether kitchen table, home office desk or lap in a quasi-quiet corner.

IDG Special Report: Dealing with the Downturn

• 7 tips for coping with a limited IT budget (CIO)
• Where to look for cost savings in the cloud (InfoWorld)
• 5 tips for navigating supplier relationships in an economic downturn (CIO)
• How businesses can save money when everyone needs Office to work from home (Computerworld)
• 10 SD-WAN features you're probably not using, but should be (Network World)

Flinging employees off the workplace carousel may have been as simple as a single "Go home" order, but ensuring that those workers can do their work from home and be productive at it (or even partially productive), takes work — a lot of work.

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