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Long awaited Office 365 to be launched on June 28
By siliconindia
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Monday, 06 June 2011, 20:50 IST
Bangalore: The Microsoft Office 365 cloud based software beta version was officially launched in October 2010 and now the full version of the cloud service is to be launched this month said Microsoft's CEO Steve Ballmer. According to a tweet posted by Jon Roskill from Microsoft, the software is to launch on the 28th June.
The web based office suite which was a beta version for a long time, did not leave Microsoft disappointed as it has attracted about 100,000 customers. The initial release was available only to limited number of customers and its gradual likeness among customers made it into a public beta in April of this year. The Office 365 has always tried to have an edge over its competitors like Google and Apple which has made the company come out with Exchange, SharePoint and Lync . These products are not available on the iMac and to compete with Google, Microsoft also has a free version available for non-business or enterprise users which competes with Google's mostly free Docs service. The cloud service will replace the current Business Productivity Online Suite (BPOS).
The existing customers who are running on BPOS will be provided 12 months of time to shift over to Office 365. The customers who are running on Office Live Small Business will get about 3 months and for small businesses it is free. They can access it at any time.
Office 365 runs on a hosted version of Microsoft's SharePoint and Exchange servers for email and collaboration, provides each user with a 25GB mailbox, and connects to Outlook 2010 and Outlook 2007. SharePoint provides the back-end storage for sharing and storing of regular Office documents and their web-based extension Office Web Apps.
The U.S. government is supposedly the benefiter as the U.S. public sector is at present suffering from massive budget shortfalls and the BPOS tool provided by companies like Microsoft and Google offer the prospect of new email systems at lower upfront costs, without customers needing to run their own servers.
Google and Microsoft are into a tug of war to bag the projects tendered by the U.S. government for BPOS.
Recently, Microsoft fished the San Francisco s city government contract for 23,000 e-mail users. The contract is to launch the 23,000 e-mail users on BPOS and Microsoft Exchange Online instead of Google - or even IBM's Lotus Notes.
