Redmond, Washington — Software behemoth Microsoft on Monday opened the floodgates on its app store to support its long-gestating cloud-based Office 365 software and is now offering the suite as a public beta for anyone to try out, as the tech titan works to fend off challenges from its arch rival Google.
Microsoft has a tendency of releasing large-scale betas for most of its products, in a sense is better in the long-run to apparently weed out bugs and other issues ahead of the general release.
Moreover, the software powerhouse will roll-out Office 365 in 38 countries and in 17 languages, as the newly released beta follows several months of limited testing among a couple thousand organizations. After the public beta, Office 365 will officially launch later this year.
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The software giant originally unleashed Office 365 as limited beta in October 2010, and since then more than 100,000 companies and organizations have signed up to help Microsoft tryout the software and prepare it for a general retail release, a Microsoft product manager said in a blog post.
The platform is essentially a re-branding of the company’s BPOS (Business Productivity Online Suite), which contain products such as SharePoint Online. The Office 365 public beta combines Microsoft Office, with hosted versions of Exchange, SharePoint, as well as Lync product, which offers online communication and collaboration piece.
As such, Office 365 is formulated to offer a wide range of features, including document creation and sharing, e-mail, IM, online meetings, and public Web sites. The Office 365 Marketplace will sell Web-based applications and services that work with Office 365 — a version of the company’s Office Suite, which includes programs such as Word, Excel, OneNote and PowerPoint, and saves files to the “cloud,” which in this case is Microsoft Servers.
The Redmond Vole is promising easier collaboration between co-workers with files stored in the cloud, empowering multiple users to access Office files, make changes and keep documents up to date as needed using Office 365, which is set to officially launch sometime this year. The company is also installing protection in the form of its enterprise ForeFront security client and is promising a 99.9 percent uptime for the entire service.
According to Microsoft, the package comes in two flavors: small business on a month-to-month deal with “community support,” or enterprise with 24×7 admin support, advanced configuration and an annual contract. The service’s introductory price is $6 per user per month. In addition, no cloud effort is worth its salt without an ecosystem, and Microsoft is looking to seed its ecosystem with the launch of the Office 365 Marketplace, with more than 100 productivity apps and 400 professional services.
Interestingly, the software giant also disclosed a “Ready for Work” competition, which businesses can join using the Office 365 Facebook page. Besides, the contest will confer five small businesses prizes of $50,000 each and Office 365 free for a year, as well as a Microsoft executive who will work for the winning companies (or a charity of a business’ choice) for a day.
For aspiring participants, Microsoft is asking businesses to explain in 365 words or less, on Facebook, what inspires them to work every day and how Office 365 can help them reach their goals in the next year.