Microsoft’s launch of its Office software suite has been welcomed by many businesses. The service which puts its email, word processing, spreadsheet and other programs in the cloud can be accessed on laptops, desktops, tablets and RIM, Microsoft, Apple and Android smartphones. Thus, the launch of Office 365 will put Microsoft on par with Google and other online platforms that already offer Web-based business software programs.
Click to enlarge
The costs of using the service will depend on the size of interested businesses. For example, in the United Kingdom, small businesses with less than 25 employees are expected to pay £4 per user per month for secure access to e-mail, calendar, documents and contacts while bigger organisations will have to pay between £6 and £17.75 per user, per month and receive a wider range of extras including advanced archiving, unlimited storage and Microsoft’s Lync messaging and communications system.
In addition Office 365 customers can host whichever applications they are using in Microsoft’s data centres, used dedicated servers in those centres or put the programs on their own hardware in their own data centres. It differs from other Web versions of Microsoft Office and replaces existing Web-based offering for companies known as the Business Productivity Online Standard Suite.
Overall, Office 365 transfers the functionality of popular Microsoft Office programs into a cloud-based format – a supposed gamble because the current popularity and success of Office has been based on sales of it machine-based versions. However, in the same vein Microsoft cannot afford to be left behind as other cloud-based/online business software suites such as those offered by Zoho, VMware, IBM and Salesforce.com gain popularity.
11 Comments
Leave a Reply
Leave a Reply
This site uses Akismet to reduce spam. Learn how your comment data is processed.
Beth Snaper
July 18, 2011 at 5:39 pm
I am not familiar with Office 365. But now I believe that Office 365 is the product of Microsoft should have released in the first place.
BA
July 20, 2011 at 5:45 am
it is an amazing one to work together on both of the software and to maintain also possible. thanks
Tony Brown
July 20, 2011 at 7:55 am
Over here in the UK internet connectivity still isn’t up to the job…
Some of our clients are nearly 5km from their BT exchange which means sporadic internet speeds of up to a whopping 2Mb.
There’s no way we could recommend a company pushes all their data offsite when there’s a very big risk they might not be able to get at it 20% of the time.
I really only see cloud technologies taking off in a big way when BT infinity fibre gets rolled out nationally in around 10 years time.
Until then – it’s only going to be used by startups…
jorge
July 21, 2011 at 12:08 pm
Hmm.. this one should have been released a long time ago too.. it’s way better..
terry
July 22, 2011 at 5:00 am
I have yet to use their app before.. hmm.. nice review though..
Sandra
September 4, 2011 at 8:43 pm
Google is doing this for free now, but I don’t know about businesses.
This is the way of the future. I don’t know if the world is ready for this though.
ulya
September 7, 2011 at 10:43 pm
good news, let the project is developing at a pace
Jerryl
October 5, 2011 at 4:25 am
Google has done this already and this was imitated by Microsoft. They are now competitors. I think it’s just okay since Google also launched Google+ to compete with facebook. It’s just business as usual.
Rita Dawson
April 27, 2012 at 12:20 pm
Nice post! thanks for the informative post. I know Google has done it before but i was unaware of Microsoft doing it. Its nice of you sharing it.
Jack
May 1, 2012 at 4:18 pm
I still consider that Microsoft Office 365 is way above Google Docs. The reliability factor is much higher in my opinion
Lyn
October 17, 2013 at 10:28 am
Dear Blogger,
Thanks for sharing the information to all of us.Of Course it is helpful for us.