Your Microsoft 365 Business plan quietly expanded: here is what you gained

Since 1 July 2026 you pay more for a large share of the commercial Microsoft 365 licences. We devoted two articles to that: the full analysis and the checklist with three licence checks. What stayed underexposed in that coverage: in the same round Microsoft expanded the contents of the Business plans.

The rollout ran in phases from June to early August. There is a good chance, then, that functionality landed in your tenant last month that you are not using yet. Three things in a row — plus the pitfall that comes with each.

1. Your mailbox grows from 50 to 100 GB

The most tangible expansion, and it applies to all three Business plans: Business Basic, Business Standard and Business Premium go from 50 GB to 100 GB of Exchange Online mailbox per user.

That resolves a classic irritation. In organisations that keep everything — and there are many — the mailboxes of long-serving staff were hitting the ceiling, with archives, PST files and "please delete some things" as the result. That pressure is off for now.

The pitfall: more storage is not a backup. Microsoft does not back up your data; it says so literally in the terms. A deleted mailbox, an employee emptying the wrong folder, or ransomware encrypting things — 100 GB helps against none of it. What does help is on our page about Microsoft 365 backup. With us it is part of the management package.

2. Copilot Chat has been expanded — and it is included

All Business plans gain the expanded Copilot Chat: with inbox and calendar context, and access to the Word, Excel and PowerPoint agents. In plain terms: the chat can now look into your mail and calendar instead of only answering general questions.

It is important to keep two things apart here, because this is exactly where confusion arises:

The advice we have been giving since last year does not change because of this: switch Copilot Chat on for everyone and see who really picks it up. That is immediately your shortlist for who deserves a full Copilot licence. How that calculation works out for a team of twenty, we set out in what Microsoft Copilot really costs for an SMB of 20 employees.

The pitfall: Copilot Chat sees data the user has access to — including that SharePoint archive whose permissions everyone forgot are set too broadly. So first get your DLP settings and sensitivity labels right, and *then* Copilot. The other way round is cleanup work after the fact.

3. Basic and Standard gain time-of-click protection

A smaller expansion with a surprising amount of impact: Business Basic and Business Standard gain URL time-of-click protection, drawn from Microsoft Defender for Office 365 Plan 1.

The difference with existing link checking is the moment of inspection. Previously a link was assessed when the mail arrived. Attackers know this, and therefore only switch the link to a malicious page *after* delivery. Time-of-click inspects at the moment the user clicks — precisely where things go wrong. In practice it is one of the most effective measures against phishing you can enable without bothering your users at all.

The nuance: this is not the full Defender package. Business Premium keeps its lead with attachment scanning, Intune device management and Conditional Access. What this does do is make the baseline protection of Basic and Standard considerably more serious.

4. Copilot now also comes in fixed bundles

Finally, a packaging change: since 1 July Microsoft offers permanent bundle SKUs with Copilot already included — Business Standard with Copilot and Business Premium with Copilot. Where Copilot was previously a temporary promotion, it is now a fixed choice in the catalogue.

Our advice remains level-headed: a bundle only pays off if you are genuinely going to use Copilot organisation-wide. If that applies to part of your team, separate Copilot licences for that group are almost always cheaper. Which licence suits whom is worked out in Copilot Business vs Enterprise.

What to do this month

Four actions, about an hour of work in total:

1. Check whether the expansions have landed. In the Microsoft 365 admin centre you can see per mailbox whether the 100 GB has been applied.
2. Switch Copilot Chat on — after your DLP check. In that order, not the other way round.
3. Verify that time-of-click is active for your Basic and Standard users.
4. Revisit your licence mix. The plans have become both more expensive and richer; that changes the trade-off between Standard and Premium. The three checks for that are in this article.

Prefer us to run through it?

We perform this check free of charge for any SMB that wants it — including non-customers. Request the free licence check via the IT check, or book a consultation if you would rather talk it through. Current prices and packages are on our Microsoft 365 page; for Microsoft 365 including management, backup and support see Microsoft 365 for SMBs.

*This article describes the package changes Microsoft rolled out in phases between June and August 2026 for Microsoft 365 Business Basic, Standard and Premium. Check in your own tenant whether the rollout is complete; Microsoft announces this in the Message Center.*