San Francisco — Microsoft on Monday announced that it is extending the availability of its online versions of several key Office productivity and collaboration applications for trial to businesses of all sizes in 19 countries and announced plans to release Microsoft Office Communications Online, including Exchange, SharePoint, Office Live Meeting and Calendaring service for the occasional user.
Collectively, the service is referred to as Business Productivity Online Suite (BPOS), and is available for UK companies to begin testing from today, with commercial release is due in April. After this date, customers signing up will be allowed a free 30-day trial before payments starts on.
The announcements were made at the CeBit 2009 IT show in Hannover and suggest that availability of these services in Australia under a Telstra/Microsoft partnership is imminent. Stephen Elop, president of the Microsoft Business Division, stated that: “Customers can save between 10 percent and 50 percent in IT-related expenditures as a result of deploying Microsoft Online Services.”
Exchange Online and SharePoint Online are now available for trial in Austria, Belgium, Canada, Denmark, Finland, France, Germany, Ireland, Italy, Japan, Netherlands, New Zealand, Norway, Portugal, Spain, Sweden, Switzerland, the United Kingdom and the United States. Organizations worldwide will be able to trial and purchase the entire Business Productivity Online Suite, including Office Communications Online, in April.
UK BPOS Marketing Manager Gill Le Fevre said that the four services — Exchange Online, SharePoint Online, Office Live Meeting and Office Communications Online — can be purchased as a suite or individually.
“Our software and services strategy allows customers decide how they want to invest in IT, whether they want to operate servers themselves or let Microsoft host services such as Exchange and let us take care of all updates and patches,” she said.
BPOS also allows customers to pay only for the capacity they need, and scale up as and when necessary, Le Fevre added.
Microsoft said it would expand availability of its surface computing platform to Europe, Africa and the Middle East.
The subscription price for the online products suite, essentially having the similar functionality as the installed version, according to Microsoft, which is already available in the United States, is $15 per user, per month, and prices overseas will be comparable to this, Microsoft said. For instance, in the U.K. the suite will cost £10.04 per user, per month, and in Europe it will cost €12.78 per user, per month.
With Exchange Online, customers get a minimum 5GB of shared storage for email, calendar entries, shared tasks and contacts. Users can access their inbox via Outlook from a PC, Outlook Anywhere or Outlook Web Access. This is priced from £6.69 per user per month.
A “Deskless Worker” option for Exchange Online provides browser-based access only, at a reduced price of £1.34 per month. This option is aimed at workers who do not necessarily use a PC, but still need occasional access to email, according to Le Fevre.
Microsoft says it prides to have more than 120 partners in 11 countries developing ways to use surface computers in retail, health care, government, tourism, media, travel, banking, manufacturing and other sectors.
Microsoft has already mentioned that browser-based versions of other Office applications, namely Word, Excel, PowerPoint and OneNote, will be supported with the next version of Office, now set to ship in 2010. Currently codenamed Office 14, an alpha release build of this suite was distributed to selected testers in January.