By Despite a very popular thinking on the Internet, Bill Gates isn’t afraid of clouds. The easiest proof of that is to be seen in how today his company released a new product called Microsoft Office 365.
Microsoft Office 365 essentially offers your business (yes, I’m afraid it’s kind of business oriented) pretty much everything it needs computing wise when lugging around something even as small as a netbook isn’t doable.
I’m a bit harsh on that one. Let me put it this way. As a business owner, do you know those times that your employees have some time off, say during a cab ride or something similar?
If you do, Microsoft’s Office 365 is here to help you take it away from them. It’s all for the greater cause, it increases productivity.
Microsoft Office 365
On a more serious note, Microsoft’s Office 365 service offers access to the usual suite of software you may have licensed at work but on the move and from virtually any device.
Powerpoint presentations could be made on an iPhone, Word documents could be quickly edited of a netbook and so on. This would be done via a cloud service so there are no concerns about performance on your hardware’s side.
The real gain is in the increased mobility and connectivity that you can get with the 365 version of Microsoft Office. Your e-mail, calenders, schedules and contacts can be accessed and modified from virtually anywhere, thus making it much easier to set up appointments, remind yourself about meetings and the people you’ll be seeing.
There’s only one slight catch with the Microsoft Office 365 package. It doesn’t come with anything to blow your mind. I’m aware that it is business prone but still, what Microsoft is offering here is a version of Office that’s cloud based and that’s the end of it.
Microsoft Office 365
If you’re the sort that gets over these things, you may want to know that prices (let’s remember, this is Microsoft after all) start at $6 per user, per month for very small companies and pretty much goes up from there on depending on number of users, company size and number of services you want access to.
In the interest of fairness, I’ll say that the pricing is pretty much a fair one, unlike with other Microsoft products. What that means though is that it will have a though competing with the free Google Apps get up.
Having worked in a true corporate environment, I know how important access to Microsoft’s service department can be, but nevertheless, I wouldn’t get one and I’m sure most of you aren’t interested in a subscription to Office 365.
