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by Chris Day @ Fully Managed™ There is a lot of excitement building around the upcoming release of Office 365 for business. As I was reviewing the available enterprise options for Office 365 today, it became even more apparent to me that this is truly the not-too-distant future of business productivity for small and medium-sized businesses. What 30 employee company wants to spend $15,000 on Office 2010 anyway? Even with OVS licensing options making this more palatable, the monthly subscription model is the silver bullet to widespread adoption.
This is a great proactive step by Microsoft to ensure they retain market share and evolve beyond software to a true services company. While the change in revenue model is probably a tough pill to swallow (we've certainly seen a lot of change inside Microsoft to accomodate this shift), I am certain that it is the right long term move.
For $24/user/month, our clients will gain access to the entire back-end stack (Exchange, SharePoint, Lync). Also included is a copy of Office 2010 Professional, providing the familiar and powerful tools they are used to (i.e. unlike Google Apps). So, a company of 25 staff will be paying $600/month and truly be in a position where they can free themselves from the need to own or host servers for these core productivity apps with no major capital expenditure every 3-5 years.
The cloud is becoming a fast-approaching reality for many businesses, and this new offering from Microsoft will truly be a game-changer for many of the businesses we support today. Like many, we are eagerly anticipating the release of this offering so that we can start moving our client base in Vancouver and Edmonton to it as soon as possible, further increasing their performance and productivity and enabling us to focus on more strategic technology initiatives for their business.
