Office Enterprise 2007 Key Office 365 Sorry, folk

Microsoft held a 30-minute press conference on October 19 to unveil its technique for planned upgrades to its Organization Productivity On the web Suite (BPOS), its Live@Edu offering and its Office Live Small Organization company. That's what its Workplace 365 announcement was all about. (More nitty-gritty Workplace 365 pricing and licensing details could be found here.)The Office 365 announcement wasn't about making a brand new edition of Workplace that can be hosted in/on/via the cloud (contrary to quite a few headlines/reports you might have read claiming this).Microsoft Office did figure in to the Office 365 announcement in a few of methods. Microsoft introduced that for consumers who wish to acquire the Office Professional Plus version 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 Office, instead of paying for it all at once,Office 2010 Professional, up front.(As one of my readers reminded me today, Microsoft volume licensees already can get this same Workplace Pro As well as SKU, though individual who obtain at retail cannot. The Pro As well as SKU is the full Workplace family of products — Word, Excel, PowerPoint,Office 2010 Sale, OneNote,Office 2010 Standard Key, SharePoint Workspace,Office Pro Plus, Outlook, Publisher, Access, InfoPath and the Lync communications client. Microsoft is not allowing Office 365 users to substitute a different Workplace SKU for it, officials told me yesterday)In addition,Office Enterprise 2007 Key, because the new versions of BPOS — the tiny organization and enterprise Office 365 offerings — will include SharePoint 2010 functionality, Microsoft might be able to offer Office 365 consumers the versions of Office Net Apps that sync with SharePoint 2010. (Workplace Web Apps are not full Workplace; they are the Webified versions of Word, Excel, PowerPoint and OneNote that Microsoft rolled out last year.)Yes, Microsoft;s announcement yesterday had lots of moving parts. But no, this was not 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 Office 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 acquire 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 details provided that New York got Microsoft to offer them a combination of Workplace Internet Apps, possibly some BPOS and some on-premises software licenses mixed together.This is definitely the way far more and extra 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 2,000 but signing up will get you a spot in line when Microsoft expands the Workplace 365 beta program.