Microsoft Office 365 goes on sale
Yesterday, Microsoft announced that its new cloud office suite was now available. According to the company, “It brings together Office, SharePoint, Exchange, and Lync in an always-up-to-date cloud service.” There are different monthly subscription levels depending on the size of your enterprise.
Two months ago we published an article on the beta version of Office 365. Now it has actually hit the market with seven different levels of service that can be accessed from the Web, your desktop or your cell phone. There is a free trial but those interested in more than 30 days of use, you will have to sign up for one of the seven plans.
For individuals and small businesses, you can get Office 365 for $6.00 per month per user. Included in this monthly subscription are email, calendar, Office Web Apps, tools for online collaboration and building websites, instant messaging, video/audio calls online, and a guarantee that your services will be up and available 99.9 percent of the time. What you don’t get are the actual office applications for use on your desktop.
Not having the actual desktop applications may not matter to many who work and move about between Internet access points, but for those who find themselves without easy Internet access, being able to work offline is critical.
In order to get your hands on the actual desktop Office applications, you have to subscribe at one of the higher midsize business and enterprise plans. Microsoft is offering four price tiers: $10, $16, $24 and $27 per person monthly subscriptions. Each tier adds services as the price goes up. The $10 per person tier contains: advanced administrative capabilities, Exchange Online, Sharepoint Online, Lync Online, antivirus/antispam filting for email; license rights to Exchange Server, Sharepoint Server, and Lync Server.
You have to jump up to the $16 per user price point to get Office Web Apps added on. The $24 range adds Office Professional Plus (actual Office desktop applications), and advanced services in Exchange Online and Sharepoint Online. The $27 range gives you Lync Server on premises.
There are also two plans for “Kiosk Workers” – people in retail, shift workers, better known as “deskless workers”. The plans range from $4 per user to $10 per users. Both plans provide 500 megabytes of email storage per user, Exchange Online services, Sharepoint Online, and Office Web Apps but the $4 plan only allows users to view documents, spreadsheets etc. in Office Web Apps.
Microsoft will be working with various resellers and partner companies. Bell Canada, Intuit Inc., NTT Communications Corp., Telefonica S.A., Telstra Corp. and Vodafone Group Plc along with others will be adding Office 365 into packages with their own services for their customers.
Google and Microsoft both have offered online Web applications and services. Although Microsoft Windows has dropped from over 91 percent of the operating systems used on computers worldwide to 88 percent it is still far greater than the next OS contender Mac with only a little over five percent. Although there have been a number of online office suites that have started up in the last decade from Zoho, Google, and OpenOffice, none has managed to gain much of a foothold with large businesses.
Microsoft’s Office 365 extends Microsoft’s dominance in the business market online. The other contenders will have a hard time providing the seamless integration of online applications with Microsoft Office desktop applications. And as with all monopolies, Microsoft’s switch to monthly subscriptions will eventually mean higher prices for all.
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