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Windows Live has a new big brother: Office 365

Oct 19, 2010 10:51 pm by Kip Kniskern | 5 comments

Microsoft announced today a beta trial of a new hosted suite of services, dubbed Office 365. The new suite combines Office Web Apps, SharePoint Online, Exchange Online, and Lync Online into a single bundle either for small businesses (less than 25 seats) for $6 per seat per month, or for enterprise at about $2 per seat per month for “basic email” all the way up to $24/mo. for the entire suite plus Office Professional Plus and support:

Office 365 for enterprises also includes the option to get Microsoft Office Professional Plus desktop software on a pay-as-you-go basis, for the first time ever. For $24 or 22.75 euros per user, per month, organizations can get Office Professional Plus along with e-mail, voicemail, enterprise social networking, instant messaging, Web portals, extranets, voiceconferencing and videoconferencing, webconferencing, 24×7 phone support, on-premises licenses, and more

It will be interesting to see where the price point tips on the low end, as very small businesses could get much of the same functionality out of Windows Live, using Office Web Apps, Hotmail (it’s the new busy!), and Windows Live Essentials (or even *shudder* tools from Google or elsewhere).

We checked earlier today and the beta was apparently already full, but now this evening even the Office365.com website, which wasn’t responding when we first tried, accepted our submission. We haven’t received an email confirmation yet, however, also apparently a known issue, so who knows if we made it in to the beta or not.

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Kind of expensive IMHO…and yeah, you pointed that out pretty clear: with Windows Live or Google Docs (or even Docs.com) you can get the same functionalities for free
- JohnCz
  Beyond the basics, there is no comparison. Office 365 offers features like workflows, managed security and group policies, compliance archiving, document retention rules, document versioning, system certifications, MS Access services for publishing a MS Access database and forms to team websites, federated single signon, and the list goes on. A friend of mine operates a small financial consultant co, the type of work they do requires something more sophisticated these free offerings. My business with 3 partners working out of our home offices has grown beyond excel for our operational needs and would greatly benefit from sharing MS Access database. Now I agree, that many sole proprietors, mom-n-pop shops..would be fine with using Hotmail, Live Groups and SkyDrive. All they need to do is use Live Admin Center to use their domain with Live services. The point here, one size doesn’t fit all.
- JohnCz
  Just to add, this is an ad free service. Sure you can get that Hotmail Plus but the price difference goes down to about $4/mo. With all the benefits I mentioned before, $6 is a good price. If you can’t afford to spend money on IT infrastructure…you might question if you are in a business. Between my three business partners, we spend about $350/mo…communications, mail services, software licensing, etc. Not bad for something we rely on to make a living.
  - Anonymous
    Thats a good point.
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I signed up about 1 hour early, and I did receive a confirmation email — so here’s hoping the beta starts soon.