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."

Comments

well duh

[goombah99]

you need the server to run the apps inhouse rather than out of your control. The same is true of things like google docs and other cloud apps. either you run it on their servers and gove third parties access to your data or you pay to run it on your servers. this is not a surprise or even unreasonable.

Re:well duh

[markdavis]

Yeah, it sounds like the article is confusing free, online, other-party-hosted applications with non-free, online, self-hosted applications. Both have existed for a long time.

Since Microsoft's main bread and butter is MS Office, why would they offer a "free" version- offline or online, other than trialware, crippleware, or sampleware?

Re:well duh

[illumin8]

you need the server to run the apps inhouse rather than out of your control.

Some things should be mentioned here for those that aren't familiar with Sharepoint.

I work for a Fortune 15 company and we are required to use Sharepoint, instead of a simple file server, to store all of our Office documents already. Sharepoint is a terribly, terribly flawed "workplace collaboration" software. It's basically a glorified WebDAV server that supports versioning, and also allows people to post little "widgets" like calendars that integrate with Outlook.

Sharepoint is Microsoft's answer to Mediawiki and other real media sharing web services. In fact, for 99% of all companies, Mediawiki running on an internal server would be much better than Sharepoint, and provide much more functionality, without requiring a copy of MS Office to be installed on everyone's client PC. But, corporate america, in their infinite wisdom, only trusts Microsoft products, so we get stuck with Sharepoint.

I hate the fact that I'm required to use a Microsoft browser to check out a Microsoft proprietary document, and edit it with a Microsoft proprietary office software package, then check it back in to a Microsoft proprietary server. This solution is the most difficult to use, from a usability standpoint, workflow point of view solution I have ever used before. Mediawiki would be a better solution for 99% of these purposes. I like the ability to just click "Edit" and start editing a page. Microsoft's solution is to keep all editing inside the Office suite, which requires checkout and checkin of each individual document. It's a terrible solution, rooted in an outdated "document centric" methodology.

Re:well duh

[jbeale53]

FYI, Sharepoint 2007 SP2 now supports Firefox with no config changes.

Google charges too, for corporate Docs accounts

[themeparkphoto]

Google has paid services too with similar pricing models. While there is a free "Google for domains" that gives you docs, etc, on your domain, there are additional paid tiers of support.