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The Hidden Costs of Microsoft's Free Office Online
Michael_Curator writes "Despite what you've heard, the online version of Office 2010 announced by Microsoft earlier this week won't be free to corporate users. Business customers will either have to pay a subscription fee or purchase corporate access licenses (CALs) for Office in order to be given access to the online application suite (Microsoft already does this with email — the infamous Outlook Web Access). But wait — there's more! A Microsoft spokesperson told me that customers will need to buy a SharePoint server, which ranges from $4,400 plus CALs, or $41,000 with all CALs included, if they want to share documents created using the online version of Office 2010."
Oh god, I have to second that - Sharepoint is abysmally unproductive. From a technical point of view that you can put documents online and access them through a web browser, it works. However, for some reason, no sharepoint server has ever made it easy to find or access those documents, they always end up in a sprawl of links.
I wouldn't start top describe the 'addon' functionality as I doubt anyone really uses it.
What makes you think your data is safe on your computer? Microsoft can access anything on your PC if they so choose. So can police and others. They don't even need to tell you about it.