Microsoft announces Office 365 - a new generation of cloud office suite for business

Yesterday at a special event, Microsoft announced a new generation of its cloud-based office suite for business. Previously, this package was called Business Productivity Online Standard Suite (BPOS).

BPOS is a rather old Microsoft service. Its services are already used by the largest companies in the world. At the presentation there was this slide:


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In addition, many government agencies, such as Minnesota, USA, use BPOS completely migrating to BPOS, California also uses BPOS as the basis for a mail solution.

Microsoft is offering a free version of BPOS for education called Live @ edu, dozens of universities around the world have already taken advantage of this offer.

For the new version of the product, another name was chosen - Office 365 .



Office 365 is a collection of the following components:

• Exchange Online - is a mail service with most of the features available in Exchange Server 2010 SP1;
  
• Lync Online is a cloud service based on the Lync 2010 product and offering communication capabilities within the company: voice and text chat, video conferencing, PC-to-PC audio and video calls;
  
• SharePoint Online is the ability to create a corporate solution based on SharePoint using a cloud service;
  
• Office Web Apps - an online office suite of Excel, Word, PowerPoint and OneNote;
  
• In addition, one of the subscription options provides for the possibility of obtaining a desktop office suite Office 2010 Professional Plus for each user;
  
• during 2011, another part will be included in Office 365 - Dynamics CRM Online, which will allow you to manage enterprise resources.
  

All services have high security, high availability 99.9%, passed audits and received several safety certificates.

All services are tightly integrated with each other and with Office desktop applications.

There are two variants of the package: Office 365 for Small Business and Office 365 for Enterprise. Live @ edu is now part of a package called Office 365 for Education. Below is the offer of information from the presentation:



The pricing of a new generation of cloud services is very flexible: a small business (up to 25 employees) will receive a complete set for $ 6 per person per month. Corporate solutions are available from $ 2 (just mail) to $ 24 (with a desktop office suite).

Office 365 service will be available in 40 countries in 2011, preliminary beta testing will be held in 13 countries for several thousand organizations.

Useful links:

• official website www.office365.com ;
• Office 365 Product Blog ;
• video presentations and other dedicated Office 365;
• official press release from the presentation ;
• official press release ;
• a series of questions and answers to the president of the office direction at Microsoft;
• Service descriptions available in Office 365
• Office 365 official announcement in Russian ;
• official twitter @ office365.