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Microsoft Launches Office365 Cloud Offering beta April 30, 2011

Posted by Kelly Brady in : Technology Solutions , trackback

Microsoft Office 265 Logo

Microsoft recently made their new “Office 365″ cloud bundle available to public beta testers. At first glance, this looks like an attractive, web-based bundle of core applications including their latest version of the Exchange email server. Exchange 2010 is much improved, both from a performance and feature standpoint.

Office 365 will be subscription based, with the price beginning at $6 per user/month depending on services selected. The offering is designed around Office 2010 Professional Plus, and depending on the plan selected may include locally-installed version rights to Office 2010 Professional Plus, or only web-based access via a browser. All of the server functionality is on the Internet in Microsoft’s data centers – there is no hardware required (other than the PC’s needed to access the services).

The full edition of Office 365 includes the following:

Office 365 is basically a refresh of Microsoft’s current Business Productivity Online Standard Suite (“BPOS”) using the latest Microsoft technologies, as well as adding in Office Web Apps based on Office 2010. I currently use BPOS, and look forward to upgrading to Office 365, mostly to get Exchange 2010 and the enhanced Outlook Web App.

Much of the benefit of “cloud computing” is being able to purchase only the amount of capacity you need, when you need it. I have not seen the full pricing structure yet for Office 365, but I like the idea of adding the Office 2010 suite to the latest server technologies and paying by the month instead of deploying an expensive infrastructure.  I think this may be a good fit for small to medium businesses that want to upgrade, but need to avoid a large capital expenditure (not to mention the necessary routine maintenance and break-fix required of on-premise hardware).

I am working on a cost-comparison between a traditional on-premise implementation vs. Office 365. While there are other factors than cost to consider, the premise of cloud computing is that the service provider benefits from economies of scale in operating the underlying infrastructure. They are able to pass along these lower costs, and offer it as a subscription pay-as-you-go model. Of course, the value proposition is only maximized when the customer plans to use most of the features whose costs are embedded in the subscription price. So, it won’t be a good fit for all businesses, but definitely for some.  I hope to post a summary of this analysis in the near future along with guidance for those considering switching to a cloud computing model.

Click here to visit the Microsoft Office 365 Website

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