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the Free CMSWire NewsletterFinally, Office 365 has arrived in beta. Office 365 is Microsoft’s cloud-based online business application subscription service that comes in two packages: One for enterprises with 25 employees but can go as far as 50 users, the other for enterprise users that can be scaled to as many seats as necessary.
While there are a number of differences between the two, they are fundamentally the same, offering Office Web Apps, Exchange Online, SharePoint Online and Lync Online, plus an external Web site to subscribers. For enterprises there is the additional option of upgrading to the beta of Office Professional Plus, which, Microsoft says, offers all the office software you could possibly want and more.
The difference here is that, instead of having to pay out $499 for the Professional Plus license, Microsoft charges another $12 per user/month for it on a subscription basis. For that you get Word, Excel, PowerPoint, Outlook with Business Contact Manager, OneNote, Publisher, Access, InfoPath, SharePoint Workspace and Lync.
Office Professional Plus
Over the coming weeks, we will be taking a deeper look at Office 365, including SharePoint Online and Lync. For now, though, we are going to take a look at Office as it appears in the enterprise version of Office365: Office Professional Plus Beta.
Just to be clear on this — while Office Web Apps is part of the standard Office 365, to get all the features of Word, Excel and the rest of the Microsoft Office software portfolio, plus the means to collaborate on that content in real time, you have to get Professional. But we’re jumping the gun here. Let’s look at it top-down.
After downloading Professional Plus beta
What Is Professional Plus?
Professional is essentially the most recent version of Microsoft Office, connected and delivered through the cloud.
With it, users can gain access to documents, email and calendars from just about any device available in the enterprise, both mobile and desk-bound. It also includes Office Web Apps — online companions to Microsoft Word, Microsoft Excel, Microsoft PowerPoint and Microsoft OneNote — which lets users review and make edits to documents from a browser.
What Do You Get?
As you might expect, you get the latest versions of Office 2010 applications in the cloud that come with the same interface as their desktop cousins. Applications include: Access 2010, Excel 2010, InfoPath 2010, OneNote 2010, Outlook 2010, PowerPoint 2010, Publisher 2010, Word 2010, Lync 2010 and SharePoint Workspace 2010.
MS Access in Professional Plus
Capabilities
As the purpose of this is a dual one — provision of office applications and collaboration — the idea here is to enable users to work on any kind of office document, on any kind of device, and allow them collaborate no matter where the users are located.
Users can gain access to their applications anywhere, edit and review those documents and have those edits appear as they were intended in Explorer, Safari and Firefox browsers. More specifically it offers:
- Office Web Apps: Designed to work with the full versions of Word, Excel, PowerPoint and OneNote; with it, users can do light editing from virtually any device
- Microsoft Office Mobile 2010: Enables uses to share, edit and comment on documents through familiar Office environments adapted to mobile devices
- Microsoft SharePoint Workspace 2010: Work with SharePoint documents offline with Microsoft SharePoint Workspace 2010 and then update them once online again
Collaboration
With collaboration as one of the cornerstones of Office 365, it is not a surprise that there are new and enhanced features here that streamline communication, manage email and share information quicker.
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