Microsoft Office Professional Plus 2010 Office 365

Microsoft held a 30-minute press conference on October 19 to unveil its strategy for planned upgrades to its Business Productivity On-line Suite (BPOS), its Live@Edu offering and its Workplace Reside Little Organization service. That is what its Office 365 announcement was all about. (Extra nitty-gritty Office 365 pricing and licensing details could be discovered right here.)The Office 365 announcement was not about creating a new edition of Office which will be hosted in/on/via the cloud (contrary to several headlines/reports you may have study claiming this).Microsoft Office did figure to the Workplace 365 announcement inside a few of approaches. Microsoft introduced that for clients who wish to obtain the Workplace Expert As well as edition of Workplace — which runs locally on PCs, not in the cloud — Microsoft will offer it to them on a subscription basis. That means users pay a monthly fee for Workplace, instead of paying for it all at once, up front.(As one of my readers reminded me today,Microsoft Office Professional Plus 2010, Microsoft volume licensees already can get this same Workplace Pro Plus SKU,Windows 7 Pro, though individual who obtain at retail cannot. The Pro As well as SKU is the full Workplace family of products — Word, Excel,Microsoft Office 2007 Enterprise, PowerPoint, OneNote, SharePoint Workspace, Outlook, Publisher, Access, InfoPath and the Lync communications client. Microsoft is not allowing Workplace 365 users to substitute a different Workplace SKU for it, officials told me yesterday)In addition, because the new versions of BPOS — the little organization and enterprise Office 365 offerings — will include SharePoint 2010 functionality, Microsoft will likely be able to offer Office 365 buyers the versions of Workplace Internet Apps that sync with SharePoint 2010. (Workplace Internet Apps are not full Office; they are the Webified versions of Word, Excel, PowerPoint and OneNote that Microsoft rolled out last year.)Yes,Windows 7 Home Premium, Microsoft;s announcement yesterday had lots of moving parts. But no, this wasn't some out-of-the-blue change in Microsoft;s organization model. Microsoft is still pushing Office first and foremost as a PC-based software package. And the Workplace 365 small-business and enterprise offerings (the update to BPOS) remain Microsoft;s answer to Google Apps and other cloud-hosted business-app suites.Speaking of Google Apps, it looks like New York City played its Google card in negotiating its latest software volume purchase with Microsoft. The New York Times says that the City got Microsoft to change the way it licensed them software and will end up saving $50 million over five years. It sounds from the particulars provided that New York got Microsoft to offer them a combination of Office Internet Apps, possibly some BPOS and some on-premises software licenses mixed together.This is definitely the way extra and more of Microsoft;s volume license deals are going to look in the not-so-distant future — and Microsoft;s licensing folks are already plotting what to do to capitalize on that mix.One last Office 365 update: If you were among the quite a few individual who were attempting to sign up for the limited beta yesterday to no avail, try again. A Microsoft spokesperson sent the following update, re: beta sign-in problems:“The beta sign-up issues visitors we’re experiencing earlier yesterday happened when they were clicking ;submit; around the beta sign up form. The page was refreshing mistakenly. This should be fixed by now.”The beta is limited to 2,Office 2010 Professional Plus,000 but signing up will get you a spot in line when Microsoft expands the Workplace 365 beta program.