Office 365 gets official release date
Cloudy with a chance of admin
Microsoft's cloud-based Office 365 service is set to land on 28 June having been in beta since October 2010.
A tweet from Jon Roskill, a corporate VP at Microsoft, confirms the date and reveals that over 100,000 customers are already using the beta service.
The cloud-based Office 365 is intended for businesses, allowing people to use the suite of Office and business productivity programmes from within their browsers instead of installing a multitude of software apps on each of their machines.
Ah, context
As Microsoft puts it, "With Office 365, your local bakery can get enterprise-calibre software and services for the first time, while a multinational pharmaceutical company can reduce costs and more easily stay current with the latest innovations."
Quite why our local bakery would need enterprise-level administrative applications is not something that it goes on to clarify.
With this handy cloud-ability comes a price tag, although it's not clear exactly what that is. It's bound to be more than Google's Cloud Connect service which allows Windows users to sync offline Office docs with a Google account online, though.
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Microsoft will release two versions of Office 365 on 28 June – one for smaller businesses and another for larger ones.
The beta version of Office 365 includes Lync, Microsoft's video and communications client; it's unlikely that this will be replaced by Microsoft's shiny new toy Skype just yet.
Via ZDNet
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