The cloud-based software places Microsoft Office, SharePoint, Exchange and Lync into the cloud. The product was first introduced last October as Microsoft's way to bring its popular collaboration and productivity products to the web. Office 365 comes with all of the Office Web Apps (Word, Excel, OneNote, PowerPoint), as well as email support and Microsoft Access. Essentially, Microsoft has created one product for all of its cloud-based productivity software.
Office 365 also comes with ActiveSync, a new tool that lets customers access their cloud-based data (email, web apps, websites, calendars, etc.) from almost any device, including mobile phones and tablets. The company also guarantees 99.9% uptime. Executives we've spoken with seem confident in the system's redundancies and the security measures they've put in place to protect customer data.
Office 365 comes in two flavors: small business and enterprise. The small business version of Office 365 is designed specifically for small teams that don't want to deal with IT, while the enterprise version is a customizable version of Office with advanced IT configurations, Office Professional Plus, use right controls and more. The small business plan costs $6 per user per month, and the enterprise version costs anywhere between $2 and $27, depending on which features a company decides to implement.
As part of the launch, Microsoft will be working with more than 20 different service providers to package, sell and provide support for Office 365. Bell Canada, Intuit, Telefonica S.A., Telstra Corp. and Vodafone are among Microsoft's launch partners. The company already has approximately 400,000 customers on board from the beta testing of the cloud-based software.
Microsoft has been making big bets on the cloud in recent years with products like Azure, but Office 365 is by far the company's biggest push into cloud software. It faces stiff competition from Google and its Google Apps offering, though.