If you’ve ever used Microsoft Office, Sharepoint, Exchange, or any other popular service from the corporate giant, you may have at some point wished things were just a little, well, easier to use. In its never-ending effort to follow every other innovative company (*cough* Google Apps *cough*), Microsoft has unveiled its strategic plan: move everything including the kitchen sink into the cloud.
Office 365 is a service that combines Microsoft Office, SharePoint Online, Exchange Online and Lync Online with the cloud.
Announced by Kurt DelBane, president of Microsoft’s office division, at a press event in San Francisco, Office 365 is a subscription service that integrates cloud-based syncing, collaboration and accessibility to businesses and organizations worldwide. So long as a device supports ActiveSync, customers can access their e-mail, calendars, team websites and office web apps from anywhere. The inclusion of Lync also means that Office 365 has videoconferencing capabilities.
There are two editions of Office 365. Office 365 for Small Businesses is designed for organizations of one to 25 people. It’s a pre-built package that includes Office Web Apps, Lync, e-mail sync and more. It doesn’t require IT support on the user’s end and will cost $6 per user per month.
The second version is Office 365 for Enterprises. Unlike the small business version, the enterprise edition can be customized based on an organization’s needs. It can be customized so different teams have different access levels to Office 365’s features. The enterprise edition comes with everything in the small business version, plus single sign-in, Office Pro Plus (via subscription), internal social networking tools, voicemail in the inbox, and more. It costs anywhere between $2 to $27 per user per month, depending on which features the company chooses to utilize.
The beta will be available to a few thousand organizations starting today; its full launch will occur sometime next year in 40 countries. Sometime in late 2011, Office 365 will add Microsoft Dynamics CRM to its suite of products.
Microsoft is extraordinarily bullish on the cloud. DelBane said that the company believes the cloud is as radical of an innovation as the graphical user interface. Office 365 just makes sense though; the rising demand for enterprise-level cloud apps like Dropbox and Box.net is due to its ability to help teams collaborate and coordinate their efforts.
Many schools and businesses use Office, Exchange, and even Sharepoint to communicate so it will be interesting to see how many organizations adopt 365 instead of Google Apps or other competing services as mentioned above. What do you think? Would you want to use Microsoft 365 instead of Google Apps?
