Redmond, Washington — Early this year, Microsoft introduced the public beta version of Microsoft Office 365 for professionals and small businesses. Now, the Redmond Vole is planning to unleash the cloud-based version of its popular Office 365 productivity suite on June 28, the company confirmed Friday.
According to ZDNet’s Mary-Jo Foley, Microsoft has sent out invitations to a press-only Office 365 event, which will take place on June 28 in New York City, which also may be the date when the cloud-hosted service becomes largely available. CEO Steve Ballmer will be readily available at the New York launch event to discuss the “latest about Office 365,” according to an invitation she received.
“June 28th is the date for General Availability of Office 365! > 100,000 real customers on beta…Partners, are you ready???” Jon Roskill, corporate vice president of Microsoft’s Worldwide Partner Group, said via Twitter.
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The Office 365 is a cloud-based Microsoft’s successor to its Business Productivity Online Suite (BPOS), Live@Edu and Office Live Small Business products, which now comes as a monthly-subscription solution available in two versions, one for small businesses and one for enterprises.
Office 365 is a cloud based version of Office suite which comes with World, Excel and PowerPoint. The online platform is Microsoft’s response to go head-to-head with Google’s Docs in the cloud. However, the search engine giant’s offerings are free, but Microsoft does not seem to mind introducing a tiered payment plan for its cloud services. Microsoft even has a special site to compare Office 365 and Google Docs.
The commercial Office 365 version brings together the 2010 versions of Exchange and SharePoint, as well as the Lync video conferencing tool and Office Web Apps, for delivery in the cloud and is pitched for organizations that have less than 25 employees, and is priced at $6 a month per user for the subscribers.
In addition, the enterprise version has a series of offerings. The monthly subscription rate ranges from $2 to $24 per user. Subscribers will have access to Microsoft Office Professional Plus desktop software, email, voicemail, instant messaging, extranets, Web portals, enterprise social networking, and voice, video, and Web conferencing.
You can find more about Microsoft’s Office 365 here.