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Microsoft Announces Web-Based Office365
suraj.sun writes "Aiming to bolster its hosted software for businesses, Microsoft announced today that it is adding Web-based versions of Office to its collection of hosted software for business, Office365. It will also offer traditional Office as a subscription-based service. Microsoft is pricing the service as low as $6 per user per month, though that version includes only the Web-based versions of Office."
It isn't mentioned in the article, but does anyone know if Office365 "works best" with IE or is it browser-agnostic? For example, Microsoft's Outlook Web Access is quite decent when accessed with IE but with Firefox or Safari it's not nearly as nice.
Trolling is a art,
Guess that covers Word, Powerpoint, Excel, Access. So what's the rest, then ? Visio ? Exchange ?
I'm surprised it's taken this long to get this kind of offering and price point out -- it's seemed clear for a while that Microsoft would like to grow a presence in the "software as a service" space.
You forgot to factor in the 25GB Exchange online mailboxes and Sharepoint Online for each user that doesn't come with Office Professional.
This space for rent.
Oddly enough I don't know anyone who uses VBA.
I'm starting to think GNU is the problem with "GNU/Linux" these days.
It's never going to be better.
Seriously.
If Oracle were to put together a team of absolute superstars - I mean real development gurus - and head them up with the best project manager they can find - and give them just one task - "Make OpenOffice import and export seamlessly to Microsoft Office formats, including all scripting and macros", it still wouldn't be better.
For one, Microsoft would suddenly start to find patents they could sue Oracle for infringing.
For another, the next version of Office would change things, drastically. There'd be an Office XML format "version 2", and it'd make version 1 look like a paragon of well-thought out design.
For a third, by the time such a feature made it into the stable version of OpenOffice, the two things I've just listed would have already happened. Twice.
Like it or not, we live in a world where people want to share information digitally, and that sharing has to work. Microsoft's rules say you do this by running an office suite on your PC that saves files to a known format and you collaborate by sharing those files in some form - be it through Sharepoint or, if you're more old-fashioned, by email attachment and storing on a fileserver. Thing is, if you play to those rules you're more or less guaranteed to lose. This is why Google Docs doesn't and it's why Microsoft are frightened of Google. Google are playing to their rules and Microsoft haven't had to compete on someone else's terms in a very long time.
Just the link alone makes me wonder... Does MS have a secure site for office365?
Every time I start to have faith in humanity, I ruin it by driving to work between 7 and 8 am.
For people starting with nothing any office product will work. If you already have files from application , it is often better to stay with that application then switch. If you can justify the cost of the switch, then do it. If you cannot, then do not.
I use open office at home, and install it for most people that ask for office. Does it work for them yes. Then again these are not people with hundreds or thousands of files from a different office application. Have I been burned by this? Yes. When docx, xlsx, and pptx arrived it caused some problems. Asking the person to have the sender resend in the 97-2003 file format was a bit harder. Tell them they need to do a save-as not just save. I set the default to 97-2003 for the office 2007 installs I did at work. That worked for most people. Why word has to use the new format for the math equations (with the Green symbols) is beyond me though. Main point is, use what works for you.