What Microsoft got right in Office 365

Microsoft has announced a limited beta test of the replacement for its Business Productivity Online Suite (BPOS).

Due to be released in 2011, Office 365 is the overarching brand under which all the cloud-based services such as Exchange Online, SharePoint Online and Lync Online will be combined with Office Web Apps or Office 2010 Professional Plus.

Office 365 is paid for by subscription, with several plans for differently sized customers and feature requirements

Office 365 is paid for by subscription, with several plans for differently sized customers and feature requirements. All plans come with Hosted Exchange mailboxes, although the size of mailboxes varies from 500MB for kiosk workers to 25GB for everyone else.

Any single mail item can be as large as 25MB, and users can connect to their mailboxes either from Outlook Web Access or the full Outlook client.

SharePoint Online gives access to team, department and, with some editions, personal “My Site” pages. The Small Business edition also has Access Services on its SharePoint Online, allowing you to design Access databases and publish them to SharePoint for internal use by any employee, or public use on the hosted website.

Lync Online brings corporate-grade presence, instant messaging, audio and video conferencing, screen and application sharing for instant collaboration between co-workers.

It doesn’t yet include the telephony features of Lync Server, such as the ability to make calls out to the public switched telephone network (PSTN). Microsoft says it’s working on this, but expect it be an extra cost.

Office Web Apps provides basic viewing and editing facilities for Word, Excel, PowerPoint and OneNote documents, and you can add Office 2010 Professional Plus to many of the editions.

This lets you download and install the full desktop suite to your PCs, under a subscription paid yearly or monthly – you don’t get to keep the software once you stop subscribing. IT managers can move licences from person to person, with the software falling back to “reduced functionality” (read-only) mode once the licence is removed.

Working with Office

If you already have Office 2007 SP2 or 2010, they’ll work fine with the other elements of Office 365. (Office 2003 won't be supported.) Buying Office Professional Plus on subscription through Office 365 means you’ll automatically receive any updates, including the next version (currently codenamed Office 15), when they’re released.

The Office 365 Small Business plan has a low starting price and includes website hosting. It’s due to take over from the current Office Live Small Business service in the second half of 2011.

The Office 365 Small Business plan has a low starting price and includes website hosting

Existing subscribers to Office Live Small Business will be offered three months of Office 365 free when the time comes to transfer. You can add an optional subscription to Office 2010 Professional Plus to Office 365 Small Business or use your existing Office software (2003-2010), but some people may opt to get by with just the Office Web Apps.

The Enterprise plans are more costly and vary according to whether you’re an existing BPOS customer, whether you want to include Office 2010 Professional Plus, or if you just want solutions for Kiosk Workers (who get access only to Exchange Online and SharePoint Online).

There will also be options to integrate Office 365 Enterprise with existing Exchange Server, SharePoint and Lync Server installations, and to run the Office 365 suite through dedicated hosting (where you don’t share equipment with other companies at the hosting centre) or running on your own hardware at your own premises. Microsoft isn’t saying much about this last option at the moment: during this beta phase, all talk is about hosting and the cloud space.

Education plans

The Education plan is designed to connect students and teachers from a school or district via Exchange Online and SharePoint Online (I’ve seen conflicting information as to whether this includes Lync Online) and is designed to take over from Microsoft Live@Edu.