 |
| Office 365 |
Analysts says the introduction is in keeping with Microsoft's tradition of launching large-scale betas for its products, which probably works better to weed out bugs and other issues ahead of the general release.
The Office 365 beta would be available across 38 markets and 17 languages. It joins the league of Microsoft Office, SharePoint Online, Exchange Online and Lync Online.
The service is priced at $6 per user per month and additionally Microsoft is launching the Office 365 Marketplace, featuring more than 100 productivity apps and offering 400 professional services.
The software giant had originally launched Office 365 in limited beta in October 2010, and at the time announced general availability would come sometime in 2011.
According to industry commentators, the platform is basically a rebranded version of the company's BPOS (Business Productivity Online Suite), which bundled products such as SharePoint Online.
Microsoft is also interested in selling Office 365 as a customisable platform, for companies that have simpler needs and want access fewer products. Microsoft has been aggressively pushing the ''all-in'' cloud strategy over the past few months. The major components of the strategy involve pushing a variety of cloud-based IT services to corporations.
The push comes with Microsoft facing competition not only from Google, which wants to secure large IT contracts with corporations and government entities, but also kids on the block like Salesforce.com, that are attacking the company's current offerings as outdated.
Salesforce CEO Marc Benioff never misses an opportunity to drive home the point in every public speech that the enterprise IT future would be mobile-centric and constantly updated via the cloud.
Though Microsoft has so far been a desktop-centric software driven company, it cannot miss the writing on the wall of the massive paradigm shift happening in the industry: hence Office 365, Windows Azure and other platforms.
Also on the way is integration of the company's cloud offerings into BlackBerry devices and to this end Microsoft has teamed up with Research In Motion, with RIM providing cloud-based BlackBerry service in support of Office 365. RIM's BlackBerry Enterprise servers would connect ''cloud to cloud'' with Microsoft's data centres to allow Office 365 to run on users' Blackberrys.
RIM's upcoming PlayBook tablet would be able to port and display Office 365 data from any user's BlackBerry, over the BlackBerry Bridge tethering service.
According to experts a really compelling reason for considering Office 365 besides it overall value is the ability to access it from just anywhere Since it is delivered from the cloud, the tools and services in Office 365 are not tied to a single PC or device, and data can be accessed from or synced among a desktop PC, the web, and users' smartphone assuming they have a Windows Phone 7 smartphone.
