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.
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.